Anyscale Secures $100M Series C at $1B Valuation to Radically Simplify Scaling and Productionizing AI Applications

Company Behind Ray, the Fastest Growing Open Source Project in Distributed AI, Announces General Availability of the Anyscale managed Ray platform

Anyscale, the company enabling instant scaling of AI applications, has secured $100 million in Series C funding at a $1 billion valuation, bringing the company’s total financing to $160 million. Andreessen Horowitz and Addition co-led the round with participation from existing investors NEA, Intel Capital and Foundation Capital. In addition, the company today announces the general availability of the Anyscale managed platform, which enables any developer and any organization to develop and instantly scale applications without the complexity of building and managing infrastructure.

Anyscale is the company behind Ray, the first platform to combine the ability to scale the most compute-intensive machine-learning workloads with the simplicity of a laptop-like development environment. 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. Ray is the fastest growing open source project in distributed AI with 18,000 GitHub stars, and is used by thousands of organizations globally, including Amazon, Ant Group, LinkedIn, Shopify, Uber and Visa.

“Compute requirements for AI apps have been doubling every 3.5 months,” said Robert Nishihara, CEO, Anyscale. “Ray introduces a necessary and fundamental shift in how AI applications are developed and scaled. With the Anyscale managed Ray offering, we are excited to bring the power of Ray to the broader developer community and organizations worldwide.”

“With the creators of Ray at the helm, Anyscale is poised to disrupt a $13 trillion market opportunity in AI,” said David George, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, who leads the firm's Growth Fund. “The growth of the Ray community and the success of organizations globally on Anyscale continues to impress. Most importantly, the Anyscale team has a unique combination of technical leadership and experience scaling organizations to win in the market.”

“Ray and Anyscale enabled us to quickly develop, test and deploy a new in-game offer recommendation engine based on reinforcement learning, and subsequently serve those offers 3X faster in production. This resulted in immediate revenue lift and a better gaming experience,“ said Emiliano Castro, Principal Data Scientist for the mobile gaming giant, Wildlife Studios. “The scale and simplicity of Anyscale’s managed offering has enabled us to significantly speed up time-to-market on new products and experiences for our players.”

Anyscale’s managed offering is used for a broad range of applications today such as supply-chain logistics, virtual environment simulations, retail personalization, environmental restoration and more. With the general availability of Anyscale’s managed offering, organizations can quickly onboard and experience the power of Ray. Highlights of the Anyscale solution include:

• Infinite Laptop Experience: Anyscale gives developers the power of the cloud along with the simplicity of a laptop-like development experience. It enables developers to scale applications from their laptops to the cloud without rewriting the applications and without the overhead of building and managing complex infrastructure.
• Instant Deployment to Production: Anyscale eliminates the complexity of bringing AI applications to production. The fully managed offering provides simple APIs for automating jobs, dependency management, and cluster management as well as out of the box monitoring and alerting.
• Instant Serverless Scaling: Anyscale provides a serverless experience without serverless limitations. Users benefit from rapid autoscaling for any application without run-time limits and without restrictions on the use of GPUs or other accelerators.
• Multi-cloud Native: Anyscale enables users to run their Ray applications on the Anyscale managed cloud offering. Applications can be seamlessly migrated from one cloud to another with the click of a button.

About Anyscale:

Anyscale, the company founded by the creators of Ray, is accelerating the development and productionization of AI applications, at any scale. Ray, the fastest growing open source project in distributed AI, lets developers instantly scale applications from a laptop to the cloud, without the cost or expertise of building complex infrastructure. By empowering developers of all skill levels to effortlessly develop and scale the end-to-end AI lifecycle on a single compute substrate and deploy the app into production, Anyscale is enabling organizations to bring AI products to market faster and at lower costs. Backed by Andreessen Horowitz, NEA and Addition, Anyscale is based in San Francisco, CA. www.anyscale.com

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