– USA, CA – Anyscale, the company behind the Ray open source project, today announced it has raised $40 million in Series B funding led by existing investor New Enterprise Associates (NEA) with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Foundation Capital, and Intel Capital, bringing the total funding to date to more than $60 million.
Concurrent with the financing, Anyscale also announced that Pete Sonsini, General Partner and Head of Enterprise Investing at NEA, will join its board of directors.
“The demand for distributed computing continues to increase with the widespread adoption of AI and machine learning in application development,” said Pete Sonsini, General Partner at NEA.
He added: “Still, scaling applications on clusters remains extremely challenging. Serverless computing is emerging as the preferred platform for developing distributed applications. Unfortunately, today’s serverless offerings support only a limited set of applications, and most of them are cloud-specific — but not Ray and Anyscale. The company’s path thus far bears the hallmarks of a standout technology pioneer, and we’re thrilled to partner with the team through this next phase bridging their open-source and commercial offerings.”
Anyscale will use the funding to further grow the ecosystem around the Ray open source project and fulfill its vision of simplifying the development of distributed applications and putting AI in the hands of every developer. In addition, Anyscale announced its first commercial offering — the Anyscale managed Ray platform, which provides developers with the illusion of an “infinite laptop” and is the first step toward making programming the cloud as easy as programming on a laptop.
“Since launching Anyscale last year, we’ve seen Ray emerging as the tool of choice for programming distributed applications,” said Co-founder and CEO, Robert Nishihara. “This is only the beginning. The investment we’re announcing today will allow us to further remove the barriers to entry for building scalable distributed applications that have held organizations back from taking advantage of recent advancements in AI and machine learning. We will continue to enhance Ray and bring to market our first commercial offering.”
Anyscale released Ray 1.0 at the recent Ray Summit, providing a universal serverless compute API and an expanded ecosystem of libraries. Ray allows developers to build scalable libraries and applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure and eliminates the need for in-house distributed computing expertise.
“The Anyscale managed Ray platform redefines serverless computing by freeing users from managing servers and enabling them to move seamlessly between their laptops and the cloud with no code changes,” said Co-founder and Executive Chairman, Ion Stoica. “This dramatically simplifies the process of developing and productionizing distributed applications and machine learning applications.”
About NEA
New Enterprise Associates, Inc. is a global venture capital firm focused on helping entrepreneurs build transformational businesses across multiple stages, sectors, and geographies. With nearly $24 billion in cumulative committed capital since the firm’s founding in 1977, NEA invests in technology and healthcare companies at all stages in a company’s lifecycle, from seed stage through IPO. The firm’s long track record of successful investing includes more than 230 portfolio company IPOs and more than 390 mergers and acquisitions.
For more information: https://www.nea.com/
About Anyscale
Anyscale is the future of distributed computing. Founded by the creators of Ray, an open-source project from the UC Berkeley RISELab, Anyscale enables developers of all skill levels to easily build applications that run at any scale, from a laptop to the cloud. Anyscale empowers organizations to bring AI applications to production faster, reduce development costs, and eliminate the need for in-house expertise to build, deploy, and manage these applications. Anyscale is based in Berkeley, CA.
For more information: https://www.anyscale.com/
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