The AI-powered, developer-first platform streamlines the use of machine learning in software applications, enabling front line developers to get started in minutes vs. months
Investors in the round include Madrona Venture Group, Picus Capital, TA Ventures as well as Nat Friedman (CEO of GitHub) and Mark Russinovich (CTO of Microsoft Azure), amongst others.
Spice AI, a startup enabling developers to easily integrate AI into their applications, today announced funding of $1 million from leading AI-focused venture and angel investors. Founders Luke Kim and Phillip LeBlanc have spent years building cloud applications from the ground up and witnessed firsthand the inefficiencies in building AI applications that required teams of data scientists and extensive cross-team collaboration.
“Building intelligent apps that leverage AI is still way too hard, even for advanced developers. Our mission is to make it as easy as creating a modern web page. This mission is in service of our vision to make quality-of-life improving AI accessible to all,” said Luke Kim, CEO.
Spice AI takes a developer-first approach to building intelligent apps. Spice AI’s first release and namesake, Spice.ai, is an open-source project that enables developers to access machine learning tools in minutes instead of months.
Using time-series data, Spice.ai lets developers create applications that learn and adapt using AI-powered recommendations. The platform then lets developers improve those AI capabilities with fast local development cycles and modern CI/CD workflows. Spice.ai was built for developers first, using a portable runtime that operates as a container or microservice on any public cloud, on-premises, or edge hardware. Applications can make calls to Spice.ai using a simple HTTP API, allowing developers to use their favorite languages and frameworks.
Expandability and community are significant parts of Spice.ai’s design, leveraging community-driven components for streaming & processing time-series data and letting developers create intelligent models quickly & easily. Developers can also share “Spicepods” – software packages that include an application’s machine learning capabilities and dependencies – allowing for easy collaboration and reliable co-deployment; these can be found and shared on Spice Rack, an integrated registry service at spicerack.org.
Spice AI is backed and advised by a number of tech leaders, including Nat Friedman (CEO of GitHub) and Mark Russinovich (CTO of Microsoft Azure), together with institutional investors, Madrona Venture Group, Picus Capital, TA Ventures, Elysium Venture Capital, Cardinia Ventures, and Founder’s Co-op.
“Madrona has been investing in intelligent applications for nearly a decade and are excited by Luke and Phillip’s vision to seamlessly bring AI development into existing workflows for developers to accelerate and build high-quality applications,” commented Aseem Datar, Partner, Madrona Venture Group. “This is just the beginning, and I am excited to be on this journey together and work with such a talented team from day one to make it real.”
Spice AI will use the funding to build the core team in the Pacific Northwest and is currently hiring full-time software and machine-learning engineers.
The Spice AI team is looking for community feedback on its inaugural release, which can be found at the Spice.ai project on GitHub.
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