Funding Led by HalfCourt Capital with Participation from Mozilla Ventures, BrightSpark, AlleyCorp, Sentiero, and Union Bay Partners
Jozu, the company building enterprise-grade orchestration tools for AI applications, today announced it has raised $4 million in seed funding. The round was led by HalfCourt Capital, with participation from Mozilla Ventures, BrightSpark, AlleyCorp, Sentiero, and Union Bay Partners.
The investment will accelerate Jozu’s mission to provide security-conscious organizations with AI/ML lifecycle tooling that accelerates AI projects from development to production—without compromising compliance, security, or operational agility.
Meeting Enterprise Demand for AI Operations
As businesses move from AI prototypes to production, they face significant challenges managing the complexity of AI/ML projects. Jozu provides a comprehensive solution for AI model and agent orchestration, enabling organizations to deploy and scale AI solutions with confidence.
“Organizations are moving from prototypes built with OpenAI and Anthropic, to production deployments using self-hosted models to protect their data and competitive advantage,” said Brad Micklea, CEO & Founder of Jozu. “That isn’t as simple as grabbing an open source model from Hugging Face – AI models and Agents need to be integrated, tested, secured, and audited throughout their lifecycle. This funding will allow us to meet the rapidly growing enterprise demand for tools that simplify, secure, and speed the productization of self-hosted AI projects.”
Strategic Investment Fuels Growth
The seed round will support Jozu’s ambitious growth plans for the next 18-months, including:
- Expanding Platform Capabilities – Creating the industry’s first extensible AI operations control plane to streamline AI/ML deployment, inference, security, and governance
- Enhancing AI Security & Compliance – Integrating AI/ML security scanning, model lineage tracking, and signing frameworks to help businesses meet regulatory and operational requirements
- Scaling Open Source Adoption – Working with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) to establish an open standard for AI model packaging, with KitOps.org as its reference implementation
- Growing the Team – Hiring world-class engineers and go-to-market experts focused on building the future of DevOps for enterprise AI
KitOps: Foundation for AI Development
Jozu’s open source standard, KitOps, which is part of the CNCF, has already gained significant traction as the preferred packaging and versioning solution for organizations self-hosting AI/ML models. Unlike proprietary formats that lock businesses into a single vendor and aren’t compatible with existing DevOps tools, KitOps leverages OCI (the same standard used for containerized applications), ensuring that AI models are portable, reproducible, and secure.
Major organizations in the private and public sectors from North America, the European Union, and Asia have integrated KitOps into their AI/ML platforms. The project has been downloaded over 85,000 times in its first year and is being used in enterprise production environments globally.
Investor Perspectives
“The next phase of AI adoption is all about operational excellence,” said Rob May, General Partner at HalfCourt Capital. “Jozu is building the critical infrastructure that will allow enterprises to deploy and manage AI applications with the same rigor – and the same teams and tools – they use with traditional software. We’re excited to support their vision for making enterprise AI operations seamless, secure, and scalable.”