- The funding was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia
- It is founded by the creators of Uber’s Michelangelo machine learning platform
Tecton.ai has announced that it has received $25 million in seed and Series A funding co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia. It has emerged from stealth and formally launched with its data platform for machine learning. Both Martin Casado, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and Matt Miller, partner at Sequoia, have joined the board. Tecton helps data scientists to turn raw data into production-ready features, the predictive signals that feed machine learning models.
Tecton.ai founders Mike Del Balso (CEO), Kevin Stumpf (CTO), and Jeremy Hermann (VP of Engineering) worked together at Uber. When the company was struggling to build and deploy new machine learning models, they created Uber’s Michelangelo machine learning platform. It helped in scaling Uber’s operations to thousands of production models serving millions of transactions per second in a few years.
Last-mile delivery issues
Del Balso, Tecton.ai co-founder and CEO said, “Data problems all too often cause last-mile delivery issues for machine learning projects.With Tecton, there is no last mile. We created Tecton to empower data science teams to take control of their data and focus on building models, not pipelines. With Tecton, organizations can deliver impact with machine learning quickly, reliably, and at scale.”
Data challenges
Del Balso, Stumpf, and Hermann then moved on and started Tecton.ai to solve the data challenges that are the biggest setbacks to deploying machine learning in the enterprise today. This makes engineering teams spend the majority of their time building bespoke data pipelines for each new project. They are complex, brittle, expensive, and often redundant. In the end, 78 per cent of new projects never get deployed and 96 per cent of projects encounter challenges with data quality and quantity.
Martin Casado, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said, “The ability to manage data and extract insights from it is catalyzing the next wave of business transformation. The Tecton team has been on the forefront of this change with a long history of machine learning/AI and data at Google, Facebook, and Airbnb and building the machine learning platform at Uber. We’re very excited to be partnering with Mike, Kevin, Jeremy and the Tecton team to bring this expertise to the rest of the industry.”
