What is Anyscale?

Everything is A-okay Ray! 👌

Friends,

There are so many LLM based startups, it’s getting hard to keep track.

I was watching Thursday Nights in AI via Outset Capital, and I decided they would be fun to cover.

Anyscale is a Series C unicorn startup backed by VCs including Andreessen Horowitz, Addition, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), and Foundation Capital.

Topics of the Above Video:

• Robert's journey from PhD to unicorn founder

• Lessons learned from building a business around a free, open-source project

• How the AI boom has changed his business

• Trends that came up again and again at this year's Ray Summit, notes via Ali Rohde.

They secured $100 million in Series C funding at a $1 billion valuation in December, 2021. A lot has changed in 2022 and 2023.

Anyscale, is a startup founded by a team out of UC Berkeley that created the Ray open-source Python framework for running distributed computing projects.

Ray was built to make it easy to scale AI and Python workloads — from reinforcement learning to deep learning to tuning and model serving. 

Ray is an open-source unified compute framework that makes it easy to scale AI and Python workloads — from reinforcement learning to deep learning to tuning, and model serving. Learn more about Ray’s rich set of libraries and integrations.

• Ray unifies the end-to-end AI lifecycle on a single scalable compute platform. With the strongest ecosystem of distributed machine learning libraries.

• Ray allows developers to scale everything from data ingestion, to model training, to hyperparameter tuning, to model deployment.

• Developers can build these applications on their laptop and run them at scale on hundreds of machines, with zero code changes.

A16z led the company’s Series A four years ago.