Startups

WhyLabs raises $10M Series A for its AI observability platform

Comment

Image Credits: WhyLabs

WhyLabs, a machine learning startup that was spun out of the Allen Institute last year, helps data teams monitor the health of their AI models and the data pipelines that fuel them. Last year, the startup raised a $4 million seed round and today, the team announced that it has raised a $10 million Series A round co-led by Defy Partners and Andrew Ng’s AI Fund. Existing investors Madrona Venture Group and Bezos Expeditions also participated in this round.

Only a few years ago, “MLOps” wasn’t really a thing, but it’s now an established category and we’re now seeing a growing number of startups and established players who are trying to get an early foothold in this market.

“It’s top of mind for everyone,” WhyLabs CEO Alessya Visnjic said. “We’ve really experienced a real phase shift in the last year. Today, the post-deployment maintenance of machine learning models, I think, is a bigger challenge than the actual building and deployment of models. That is what’s powering this whole MLOps shift and organizations are sharply focused on creating culture, processes and the toolchains around operating machine learning models.”

Image Credits: WhyLabs

As Visnjic noted, every company that builds AI models also struggles with transparency and observability of how they operate in production. It’s one thing to train a model but it’s a completely different challenge to ensure that the model continues to perform as expected and that the data that powers it remains trustworthy. Most of the time, models will continue to provide (wrong) predictions, after all, even if the input data is corrupted, maybe because an API changed.

“ML engineers need better tools to ensure high-quality data through all stages of an ML project’s life cycle,” said Ng. “AI Fund is excited to support WhyLabs, whose open source logging library and AI observability platform makes it easy for developers to maintain real time logs and monitor ML deployments.”

Over the course of the last year, WhyLabs has made it easier for data teams to use its service, in large part because it launched its SaaS platform with a free self-serve tier.

“A lot of our SAS work has focused on removing the configuration burden, making sure that you can just enable monitoring similarly to how you would enable monitoring of a particular compute instance,” Visnjic said. “Because we’re a SaaS, we focused on privacy a lot. It’s very critical to be privacy focused because we monitor both data health and model health.”

Specifically, that means WhyLabs never moves data around. As Visnjic explained, the service only captures the statistical fingerprints that describe the data and models. Figuring out how to monitor the highly proprietary data of its potential customers was one of the first challenges the team tackled after WhyLabs launched. It’s not just about moving data around inside a company’s data estate, after all, but also ensuring that permissions inside a company are managed well to ensure sensitive information won’t leak.

Image Credits: WhyLabs”SaaS is not just about making sure that anybody can log it,” she noted. “It’s about making sure that people can use this platform and privacy-centric way and they can plug it into any kind of machine learning stack that they’re using.”

To do that, the team also spent the last year building out its integrations with all of the major cloud platforms, machine learning frameworks and data services like Kafka, Spark and Ray.

With the launch of the SaaS platform only two weeks ago, WhyLabs COO and co-founder Maria Karaivanova noted, the number of models the service is monitoring already tripled.

The WhyLabs team plans to use the new funding to build out its engineering and go-to-market teams. On the engineering side, that also means adding improved support for streaming data and real-time AI applications. As Visnjic noted, the company’s go-to-market approach will include a focus on educating customers about MLOps, so the company is also building out an evangelism team.

“WhyLabs is in a unique position to transform how AI is governed and MLOps is managed by any enterprise with the rapid adoption of its observability platform and data logging library,” said Neil Sequeira, founder and partner at Defy Partners who has now joined the WhyLabs board of directors. “They have built what is effectively a control center for operating AI applications. In turn, their technology has a meaningful positive impact on intelligent application builders and the hundreds of millions of people touched by AI every day.”

More TechCrunch

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Is it…

Tesla lobbies for Elon and Kia taps into the GenAI hype

Crowdaa is an app that allows non-developers to easily create and release apps on the mobile store. 

App developer Crowdaa raises €1.2M and plans a US expansion

Back in 2019, Canva, the wildly successful design tool, introduced what the company was calling an enterprise product, but in reality it was more geared towards teams than fulfilling true…

Canva launches a proper enterprise product — and they mean it this time

TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 isn’t just an event for innovation; it’s a platform where your voice matters. With the Disrupt 2024 Audience Choice Program, you have the power to shape the…

2 days left to vote for Disrupt Audience Choice

The United States Department of Justice and 30 state attorneys general filed a lawsuit against Live Nation Entertainment, the parent company of Ticketmaster, for alleged monopolistic practices. Live Nation and…

Ticketmaster is at the heart of a U.S. antitrust lawsuit against parent company Live Nation

The UK will shortly get its own rulebook for Big Tech, after peers in the House of Lords agreed Thursday afternoon to pass the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer bill…

‘Pro-competition’ rules for Big Tech make it through UK’s pre-election wash-up

Spotify’s addition of its AI DJ feature, which introduces personalized song selections to users, was the company’s first step into an AI future. Now, Spotify is developing an alternative version…

Spotify experiments with an AI DJ that speaks Spanish

Call Arc can help answer immediate and small questions, according to the company. 

Arc Search’s new Call Arc feature lets you ask questions by ‘making a phone call’

After multiple delays, Apple and the Paris area transportation authority rolled out support for Paris transit passes in Apple Wallet. It means that people can now use their iPhone or…

Paris transit passes now available in iPhone’s Wallet app

Redwood Materials, the battery recycling startup founded by former Tesla co-founder JB Straubel, will be recycling production scrap for batteries going into General Motors electric vehicles.  The company announced Thursday…

Redwood Materials is partnering with Ultium Cells to recycle GM’s EV battery scrap

A new startup called Auggie is aiming to give parents a single platform where they can shop for products and connect with each other. The company’s new app, which launched…

Auggie’s new app helps parents find community and shop

Andrej Safundzic, Alan Flores Lopez and Leo Mehr met in a class at Stanford focusing on ethics, public policy and technological change. Safundzic — speaking to TechCrunch — says that…

Lumos helps companies manage their employees’ identities — and access

Remark trains AI models on human product experts to create personas that can answer questions with the same style of their human counterparts.

Remark puts thousands of human product experts into AI form

ZeroPoint claims to have solved compression problems with hyper-fast, low-level memory compression that requires no real changes to the rest of the computing system.

ZeroPoint’s nanosecond-scale memory compression could tame power-hungry AI infrastructure

In 2021, Roi Ravhon, Asaf Liveanu and Yizhar Gilboa came together to found Finout, an enterprise-focused toolset to help manage and optimize cloud costs. (We covered the company’s launch out…

Finout lands cash to grow its cloud spend management platform

On the heels of raising $102 million earlier this year, Bugcrowd is making good on its promise to use some of that funding to make acquisitions to strengthen its security…

Bugcrowd, the crowdsourced white-hat hacker platform, acquires Informer to ramp up its security chops

Google is preparing to build what will be the first subsea fiber-optic cable connecting the continents of Africa and Australia. The news comes as the major cloud hyperscalers battle it…

Google to build first subsea fiber-optic cable connecting Africa with Australia

The Kia EV3 — the new all-electric compact SUV revealed Thursday — illustrates a growing appetite among global automakers to bring generative AI into their vehicles.  The automaker said the…

The new Kia EV3 will have an AI assistant with ChatGPT DNA

Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, was working improperly for several hours on Thursday in Europe. At first, we noticed it wasn’t possible to perform a web search at all. Now it…

Bing’s API was down, taking Microsoft Copilot, DuckDuckGo and ChatGPT’s web search feature down too

If you thought autonomous driving was just for cars, think again. The “autonomous navigation” market — where ships steer themselves guided by AI, resulting in fuel and time savings —…

Autonomous shipping startup Orca AI tops up with $23M led by OCV Partners and MizMaa Ventures

The best known mycoprotein is probably Quorn, a meat substitute that’s fast approaching its 40th birthday. But Finnish biotech startup Enifer is cooking up something even older: Its proprietary single-cell…

Meet the Finnish biotech startup bringing a long-lost mycoprotein to your plate

Silo, a Bay Area food supply chain startup, has hit a rough patch. TechCrunch has learned that the company on Tuesday laid off roughly 30% of its staff, or north…

Food supply chain software maker Silo lays off ~30% of staff amid M&A discussions

Featured Article

Meta’s new AI council is composed entirely of white men

Meanwhile, women and people of color are disproportionately impacted by irresponsible AI.

20 hours ago
Meta’s new AI council is composed entirely of white men

If you’ve ever wanted to apply to Y Combinator, here’s some inside scoop on how the iconic accelerator goes about choosing companies.

Garry Tan has revealed his ‘secret sauce’ for getting into Y Combinator

Indian ride-hailing startup BluSmart has started operating in Dubai, TechCrunch has exclusively learned and confirmed with its executive. The move to Dubai, which has been rumored for months, could help…

India’s BluSmart is testing its ride-hailing service in Dubai

Under the envisioned framework, both candidate and issue ads would be required to include an on-air and filed disclosure that AI-generated content was used.

FCC proposes all AI-generated content in political ads must be disclosed

Want to make a founder’s day, week, month, and possibly career? Refer them to Startup Battlefield 200 at Disrupt 2024! Applications close June 10 at 11:59 p.m. PT. TechCrunch’s Startup…

Refer a founder to Startup Battlefield 200 at Disrupt 2024

Social networking startup and X competitor Bluesky is officially launching DMs (direct messages), the company announced on Wednesday. Later, Bluesky plans to “fully support end-to-end encrypted messaging down the line,”…

Bluesky now has DMs

The perception in Silicon Valley is that every investor would love to be in business with Peter Thiel. But the venture capital fundraising environment has become so difficult that even…

Peter Thiel-founded Valar Ventures raised a $300 million fund, half the size of its last one