Today, we’re launching Substrate. We’re also announcing our $8M Series Seed led by Lightspeed. We believe the most robust, reliable, and productive uses of AI are when many models are used in coordination with each other, with regular programming mixed in. Most people building with AI already know this. But the available tools are suboptimal, unless you work for Google. For the rest of us, we’re left creating an unwieldy mess of chained API calls to multiple providers, with many roundtrips in between. We took a hard look at this state of affairs, and recognized how much it is stifling progress. Building large multi-step AI workloads requires sophisticated high-performance tooling and infrastructure. Nobody wants to deal with more tooling and infrastructure… but everyone would benefit from simple, intuitive interfaces that abstract away a powerful system underneath. No tooling, no infrastructure – just elegant abstractions.
Last September, I left Stripe after 8+ years to build something new with my friend Rob Cheung. Today, we're launching Substrate, the first inference API optimized for multi-step AI workloads. https://substrate.run With Substrate, you connect nodes from a curated library that includes optimized ML models, built-in file and vector storage, a code interpreter, and logical control flow. By simply connecting nodes, you describe a graph workflow, which Substrate then analyzes and runs as fast as possible. Entire graphs of many nodes will often run on a single machine, with microsecond communication between tasks. With this launch, we're announcing our $8M Series Seed led by Lightspeed with participation from South Park Commons, Craft Ventures, Red Swan Ventures, and Lorimer Ventures, joined by industry luminaries like Guillermo Rauch, Immad Akhund, William Gaybrick, Chris Best, Gokul Rajaram, Shreyas Doshi, Jana Messerschmidt, Michael Manapat, and Matthew Hartman. We’ve been working on Substrate privately for nearly a year. We’ve battle-tested the product with great customers like Substack, and we’re finally ready to open access to everyone. Substrate was built by an exceptional team: Liam Griffiths, Rishabh Parikh, 💭 Kyle Pitzen, and Chris S., who bring years of experience building world-class software at Stripe, Pulumi, Robust Intelligence, Confluent, Zendesk, and Grailed. Truly, I have never enjoyed working with a group of people more in my entire career. Thank you to all our friends and early supporters for helping us in the first chapter of this adventure: Aditya Agarwal, Ruchi Sanghvi, Shreyans Bhansali, Namrata Patel, Andrew Kortina, iqram and the immigrant groove, Sam Lessin, Julian Connor, Mike Cohen, Jairaj Sethi, Chris Mueller, Stanislas Polu, Sabrina Hahn, Anne Lee Skates, Audrey Kim, Quinn Garner, Jason Cui.
Product @ Weights & Biases - The AI Developer Platform
5moCongratulations, Ben and Rob on the launch!