Cake Raises $13M to Democratize Open-Source AI Infrastructure for Businesses

Cake Raises $13MM Seed Round Led by Gradient to Enable Any Business to Adopt Open-Source AI

Cake, a managed open-source AI infrastructure platform, today announced it has raised $13MM to bring cutting-edge AI to the mid-market. The recent seed round was led by Gradient, Google's early-stage AI fund, with prior pre-seed funding and participation from Primary Venture Partners. Gradient and Primary were joined in the round by Alumni Ventures, Friends & Family Capital, Correlation Ventures, Firestreak Ventures, and many industry-veteran individual investors. Cake accelerates AI initiatives with a platform for seamless deployment, integration, and management of dozens of popular open source AI technologies. Cake's platform transforms the latest innovations into widely available, production-ready infrastructure, lowering the barrier to entry around state-of-the-art AI for companies bottlenecked on engineering bandwidth. "Companies in every sector are investing in the latest technologies with an eye toward winning in their markets with AI," said Misha Herscu, CEO and co-founder of Cake. "Unfortunately, the cutting-edge has historically been the exclusive domain of large ML engineering teams. At Cake, we're working to ensure that businesses of any size can confidently deploy the latest technologies, within days, or even hours, and without requiring an army of engineers. Customers across financial services, healthcare, insurtech, e-commerce, and traditional SaaS already rely on Cake's fully-managed AI infrastructure platform in production for core business use cases." Cake complements the raw power and speed of the open-source community with centralized platform capabilities, including security, user management, cost visibility and optimization, compute management, system monitoring, and autoscaling. In addition, Cake's ongoing support for upgraded versions of open-source AI packages allows customers to stay up-to-date without concerns about breaking existing deployments. "Our partnership with Cake has been a clear strategic choice - we're achieving the impact of two to three technical hires with the equivalent investment of half an FTE," says Scott Stafford, CTO of Ping Data Intelligence, an insurtech platform powered by machine learning. "Staying at the forefront of AI advancements is essential for us, even as a young company, to remain competitive and agile. Having Cake as a key partner on this journey provides invaluable confidence that we're equipped to evolve alongside these rapid changes." "As early investors in AI companies such as Lambda Labs, Writer, Streamlit, and many others, we've seen businesses of all sizes struggle to deploy models and AI tools into production," said Darian Shirazi, Managing Partner at Gradient. "When we first met the team at Cake, it was incredible to see the number of customers deeply engaged with their solution. Misha and Skyler have not only built a product customers want, they're also extremely dedicated to listening, collaborating, and learning from non-technical companies looking to deploy AI into production." Cake helps customers stay on the AI frontier with a unique platform architecture focused on continuously integrating the latest breakthroughs. The Cake architecture separates the underlying platform infrastructure from loosely coupled open-source AI components. This enables a uniquely flexible and modular approach to managing an overall AI environment. New technologies are incorporated as they emerge, and teams can easily upgrade to the latest versions or adopt new components entirely - eliminating the risk of lock-in. Expert project support and pre-built templates for common use cases provide additional guidance for AI leads, data scientists, and MLOps engineers to confidently drive projects to production. About Cake Cake is a comprehensive and flexible AI infrastructure platform for solving hard problems quickly. Launched in 2023 and based in New York City, Cake features a curated selection of pre-integrated and fully-managed open-source AI components for businesses of all sizes to deploy AI into production far faster and more easily than was possible before Cake. Currently the only end-to-end managed open source AI infrastructure stack, Cake supports customers actively replacing existing workflows with cutting-edge AI models. For more information, please visit https://www.cake.ai/. About Gradient Gradient has been investing at the forefront of artificial intelligence since 2017. We are led by former founders, technical experts, and domain specialists who have supported hundreds of AI founders from the beginning. Gradient is headquartered in San Francisco. For more information, visit www.gradient.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20241204641063/en/

Google's Gradient backs Cake, a managed open-source AI infrastructure platform

A new company is emerging from stealth today with backing from Google's AI-focused venture fund to help businesses compile their open-source AI infrastructure and reduce their engineering overheads. Cake integrates and secures more than 100 components for enterprises, including data source adapters (e.g. Apache Hadoop), data ingestion (e.g. Apache Kafka), data labelling (e.g. Label Studio), vector and graph databases (e.g. Milvus or Neo4j), generative AI APIs and related tools (e.g. Anthropic), among many other categories. This hints at why Cake is called what it is -- it takes the various "layers" that constitute the AI stack, and integrates them into a more digestible, production-ready format suitable for business. On top of its formal unveiling today, Cake said it has raised $13 million since its inception. This includes $3 million in pre-seed funding through its formative couple of years, and a recent $10 million seed round led by Google's Gradient Ventures. "We haven't been super secretive; we've just been building, and working with customers," Herscu explained to TechCrunch in an interview last week. Previously, Herscu founded an AI company called McCoy Medical Technologies that was focused on machine learning infrastructure for radiology, and sold it in 2017 to IT vendor TeraRecon. He later joined New York VC firm Primary Venture Partners as "operator in residence," where he pursued his next venture by chatting with hundreds of data science and AI executives. "I did over 200 customer discovery calls, asking what their biggest pain points and bottlenecks are," Herscu said. "The biggest problem wasn't a single part of the stack, such as setting up a vector database or data pipeline. It was that there are a ton of different components across a very rich ecosystem. How do you go about integrating everything reliably, and making it production ready?" This is what Herscu refers to as the "big picture problem," and is where his new business enters the fray. Cake is all about making sense of the myriad open-source components that constitute the modern AI stack, and providing bundled, managed, open-source AI infrastructure for small teams. This isn't about building a business around a single open-source project as countless companies have done; instead, it's about assembling and serving a curated selection of open-source projects across an entire stack and making it run smoothly. Let's say a large financial services company has millions of documents containing complex financial data, and it wants to do RAG (retrieval augmented generation) against these files to improve the quality of the responses to natural-language queries. If an off-the-shelf product isn't up to the task, or is unsuitable for compliance reasons, the company would have to build its own system by installing and stitching multiple different components. That's a time-consuming endeavor that Cake can take care of. Elsewhere, a hospital might need to construct a secure system for analyzing images from CT scans, or an e-commerce company might want to upgrade its recommendation engine. These are all potential use-cases for Cake. "We do run the gamut, but I'd say our sweet spot is definitely when companies are going beyond what you can do with a simple, off-the-shelf product," Herscu said. Parallel development Cake's CTO Thomas previously worked at IBM as a chief architect, and more recently he was a distinguished engineer and director of strategy at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which acquired a previous company he worked at called MapR. Thomas says he has worked across hundreds of projects through the years, with large and smaller customers, and he noticed a trend permeating pretty much all of them -- every one was using open-source tools in some way, much of it fresh out of research labs. Still, using them in the enterprise wasn't easy. "It takes a huge amount of time for even the largest enterprises to take what's coming out of the labs and integrate it into what they do," Thomas told TechCrunch. "A lot of that is because most of it isn't ready for the enterprise -- it might not have authentication and authorization, and enterprises have to do that themselves." There are parallels to what Cake is striving for here. In Europe, we have the likes of Finnish Aiven, a $2 billion unicorn, which is doing something similar but with a focus on data infrastructure. Perhaps the most obvious comparison would be Red Hat, which IBM acquired for $34 billion and is best known for its enterprise-grade Linux operating system (RHEL). "In the early days of Linux, there were thousands of open-source packages that everyone wanted to use, but weren't integrated and weren't secure," Thomas said. "There just wasn't a support model for it, and so the Red Hats of the world made Linux safe for the enterprise. We want to do a similar thing for AI today." While there are plans to eventually introduce a hosted version of Cake, for now companies have to run it in their own environments. For many, this won't be an issue because data privacy stipulations mean they can't send data outside their own systems anyway. But a hosted version might be appealing to organizations with lower compliance obligations. "It is actually easier for us if we can control the cloud," Herscu added. Aside from lead investor Gradient, Cake's seed round saw participation from its pre-seed investor Primary Venture Partners, as well as Alumni Ventures, Friends & Family Capital, Correlation Ventures, and Firestreak Ventures. The hitherto unannounced $10 million seed round, which closed back in April, is indicative not only of the founders' backgrounds but also the company's traction. Herscu said that the company is already looking toward its next financing round, with tentative plans to raise again around the middle of 2025. "From a traction standpoint, we look more like a Series A company already. We were able to get there pretty quickly," Herscu said. "When we go to the Series A, it'll probably look more like a Series B."