CoreWeave Acquires OpenPipe to Bolster AI Agent Training Capabilities

CoreWeave acquires agent-training startup OpenPipe | TechCrunch

CoreWeave, which provides cloud servers to large companies training AI models, has struck an agreement to acquire OpenPipe, a 2-year-old Y Combinator-backed startup that helps enterprises develop customized AI agents with reinforcement learning, the companies announced on Wednesday. "Reinforcement learning is emerging as a pivotal force to strengthen model performance on agentic and reasoning tasks," said Brian Venturo, Co-founder of CoreWeave, in a statement to TechCrunch. "By combining OpenPipe's advanced self-learning tools with CoreWeave's high-performance AI cloud, we're expanding our platform to give developers at AI labs and beyond an important advantage in building scalable intelligent systems." CoreWeave and OpenPipe did not disclose the terms of the deal. In March 2024, the Seattle-based OpenPipe raised a $6.7 million seed round, with backers including Costanoa Ventures, Y Combinator, Google DeepMind's Logan Kilpatrick, GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner, and the co-creator of GitHub Copilot Alex Graveley. The deal marks CoreWeave's latest attempt to expand down the stack, following its acquisition of the AI developer platform, Weights & Biases, in March. OpenPipe develops a popular open source toolkit for creating AI agents called ART (agent reinforcement trainer). While many of CoreWeave's biggest customers include leading AI labs such as OpenAI, the company is also trying to appeal to smaller enterprises. A growing number of AI labs and startups are building out enterprise products around reinforcement learning, which involves rewarding AI models for correct responses. Reinforcement learning has proven a strong way to improve an AI model's performance on a specific task; the idea with these enterprise product is to train AI agents specifically for a company's needs. This kind of customer-specific training requires a lot of computing resources, and by acquiring OpenPipe, CoreWeave hopes to both power and offer such services. OpenPipe's team will be joining CoreWeave, and customers of OpenPipe will become CoreWeave customers.

CoreWeave to acquire OpenPipe, a Seattle-area startup that uses reinforcement learning to help companies build AI agents

CoreWeave said it will acquire OpenPipe, a Bellevue, Wash.-based startup that helps developers train AI agents using reinforcement learning. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Founded in 2023, OpenPipe helps companies build large language models tailored to their specific use cases, offering a cheaper and more efficient alternative to prompt-based approaches. The company participated in Y Combinator's summer cohort in 2023. It raised a $6.7 million seed round in 2024. Reinforcement learning is a branch of artificial intelligence in which an algorithm (also known as an agent) learns to make decisions by trial and error, receiving rewards or penalties based on its actions. OpenPipe's strategy was that companies interested in using generative AI might not need a chatbot that can answer any question on any topic -- but rather something that understands their product line and company policies deeply to provide customer service or other capabilities. "Over the last two years we've helped hundreds of customers achieve state-of-the-art performance and reliability while saving millions of dollars by moving to smaller, faster, more reliable models," OpenPipe CEO and co-founder Kyle Corbitt wrote on LinkedIn. "We've built one of the most popular libraries for training agents with reinforcement learning, which we're improving daily." CoreWeave, a high-profile cloud infrastructure company focused on AI workloads that went public in March, said the deal builds on its recent acquisition of Weights & Biases to "deepen vertical integration across its technology stack." "By combining OpenPipe's advanced self-learning tools with CoreWeave's high-performance AI cloud, we're expanding our platform to give developers at AI labs and beyond an important advantage in building scalable intelligent systems," CoreWeave co-founder Brian Venturo said in a statement. Corbitt previously founded a family history startup called Emberall before joining Y Combinator, where he was an engineer for the startup accelerator and led Startup School, its founder community. He co-founded OpenPipe with his brother, David Corbitt, a former engineer at Qualtrics and Palantir who co-founded a video legacy startup called GenerationalStory. Costanoa Ventures, an early stage firm based in Silicon Valley, led OpenPipe's seed round, which included participation from Y Combinator and individual backers such as Logan Kilpatrick, former head of developer relations at OpenAI, Alex Graveley, creator of GitHub Copilot, and Tom Preston-Werner, co-founder of GitHub.

CoreWeave Just Acquired a Y Combinator Startup to Fuel Its AI Platform Expansion

CoreWeave, the AI-focused data center operator, announced on Wednesday that it inked an agreement to acquire OpenPipe, a startup specializing in training artificial intelligence agents. The Seattle-backed OpenPipe, founded in 2023, works with companies to build out custom A.I. models. The company, which is backed by Y Combinator, snagged $6.7 million in funding in March 2024, and works with advisors from the likes of OpenAI and GitHub. "Adding OpenPipe capabilities to our technology stack will give customers more flexibility to train, adapt, and optimize their models," CoreWeave's CEO Michael Intrator wrote in a LinkedIn post. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, and representatives for CoreWeave did not respond immediately to Inc.'s request for comment. The acquisition adds to CoreWeave's meteoric expansion as the hyperscaler expands its platform, builds out new data centers, and continues to fiercely compete in the A.I. race. (CoreWeave's three-year growth rate clocked in at 5,896 percent at the end of 2024, landing it on No. 45 on this year's Inc. 5000 list.) But the announcement arrives as CoreWeave's stock has dramatically slid from its summer peak. In mid-June, CoreWeave shares (Nasdaq:CRWV) hit a high of $187, but now hover in the realm of $90 after the company posted a second-quarter loss of $291 million and its lock-up period-a timeframe preventing company insiders from selling their shares-expired in August. CoreWeave completed its acquisition of Weights and Biases, an A.I. developer platform, in March, and had announced plans in July to acquire Core Scientific, which offers digital infrastructure and bitcoin mining capabilities, in a $9 billion all-stock deal. As CoreWeave's stock has dipped, some analysts have suggested that terms of the Core Scientific transaction may need to be renegotiated. The final deadline for the 2025 Inc. Best in Business Awards is Friday, September 12, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply now.