Replicate, a startup that runs machine learning models in the cloud, today launched out of stealth with $17.8 million in venture capital backing; $12.5 million of the total came from a Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Y Combinator, Sequoia and angel investors including Figma CEO Dylan Field and Vercel’s Guillermo Rauch, while the rest was from a previously undisclosed seed round.
The company was co-founded by Ben Firshman, who led open source product efforts at Docker, and Andreas Jansson, previously a machine learning engineer at Spotify. The way Firshman tells it, he and Jansson came to the mutual realization that AI was accelerating at an “absurd” pace, but that technical barriers were standing in the way of mass adoption.
Enter Replicate, which offers a library of open source models that software developers can run with a few lines of code. The platform can automaticall...
