Weights & Biases Raises $50 Million Round Led by Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman, Announces W&B Prompts

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Weights & Biases, the leading end-to-end MLOps platform, today announced both the close of a strategic investment of $50 million at a $1.25 billion valuation and the launch of W&B Prompts. The round was led by Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman, with additional participation from Sapphire Ventures. The round also includes participation from existing investors, including Coatue, Insight Partners, Felicis, BOND and BloombergBeta.

As the adoption of large language models (LLMs) grows, Weights & Biases has continued building out their best-in-class MLOps platform to meet the needs of the most advanced machine learning research in the world. The team will use this new influx of capital to continue to build out these tools, including the launch of Weights & Biases Prompts.

W&B Prompts allows LLM builders to better understand every step of their LLM programs so they can fine-tune, prompt engineer, and debug the latest foundational models. This is a critical step, enabling faster time to production on LLM models and the apps they power. Like many of their features, W&B Prompts was co-designed with partners and customers, ensuring it meets the needs of a rapidly changing community of practitioners.

"Weights & Biases found their footing by helping developers supervise model training, where they are the popular choice for practically everyone we know -- from Meta to OpenAI to Microsoft," said Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman. "Now that the industry is maturing, they're expanding from training to prompting – helping enterprises around the world use LLM platforms in a safe & reliable way. It is rare to find a team and company so well positioned to capture share of the ever-growing AI market – all while maintaining terrific SaaS margins."

"We're big Weights & Biases fans here at OpenAI and have been using their product for a long time. In fact, we were their first customer," said Peter Welinder, VP of Product at OpenAI. "You simply can't do ambitious, expansive projects without best-in-class tools. We use W&B to train our models at OpenAI and I'm thrilled to see Lukas and the whole team at Weights & Biases continuing to grow and build the tools practitioners need to innovate."

Weights & Biases is quickly becoming the default tooling for LLM and MLOps. The team has seen significant user growth since it raised its Series C in 2021, growing from 100,000 users to over 700,000. It is used by virtually all the major GenAI model builders like Meta, OpenAI, MosiacML, Aleph Alpha, HuggingFace, and more. In total, their MLOps platform has tracked nearly 300 million hours of machine learning experiments for customers from industry leaders like NVIDIA, OpenAI, Toyota Research Institute, Volkswagen and Square to emerging players like Cohere.

"Our goal at Weights & Biases has never changed: to build the best tools for machine learning practitioners," said CEO and Co-Founder Lukas Biewald. "We're really excited about where the field is moving, specifically the success and adoption of foundational generative AI models. Honestly, I'm thrilled to raise an institutional round from Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross—who have both trained quite a lot of their own models—and have been significant users of Weights & Biases for quite a long time."

W&B is integrated in 20,000 repos, including the LLM repos practitioners rely on like Langchain, LlamaIndex, GPT4All, and specialized infrastructure providers like Coreweave, Lambda and Graphcore. In addition to their deep, long-standing partnership with NVIDIA, Weights & Biases has partnered with other leaders in the space like Microsoft, AWS, GCP, Anyscale, and Snowflake. Cited in hundreds of state-of-the-art research papers, Weights & Biases is also a vital tool for academics pushing the boundaries of what AI can accomplish.

"Machine learning development has skyrocketed and the rate at which we are seeing new tools and experiences being built is breathtaking. To help support this tremendous wave of innovation, Weights & Biases has emerged as a leading developer-first MLOps platform," said Casber Wang, Partner at Sapphire Ventures. "Sitting at the center of the ML workflow, Weights & Biases has become the popular choice for ML practitioners. Sapphire couldn't be more excited to partner with Co-Founder and CEO Lukas Biewald, and the entire Weights & Biases team."

Few industries change at the pace machine learning does. Weights & Biases remains not only committed to building the best end-to-end MLOps platform in the world but also to evolving with the machine learning ecosystem as it moves to the broad adoption of large language models and the solutions those LLMs will power.

About Weights & Biases

Weights & Biases is the leading developer-first MLOps platform that provides enterprise-grade, end-to-end MLOps workflow to accelerate ML activities. Used by over 700,000 ML practitioners including teams at OpenAI, Toyota, Microsoft, and hundreds more, Weights & Biases is part of the new standard of best practices for machine learning.

SOURCE Weights & Biases