MLOps startup Comet raises $13M to launch model monitoring products

MLOps startup Comet today announced that it raised $13 million in a series A funding round led by Scale Venture Partners. The capital, which Comet plans to put toward product, sales, marketing, and engineering growth, comes as the company acquires U.K.-based Stakion to bolster the launch of Comet Model Production Monitoring (MPM), a product that enables organizations to track and monitor AI model quality.

MLOps, or machine learning operations, encompasses the ways organizations build and deploy models. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, enterprises have accelerated their investments in AI as part of an effort to drive digital business transformations. MLOps platforms could generate annual revenues in excess of $4 billion by 2025, according to Deloitte. That’s not surprising in light of a McKinsey report suggesting that AI, if successfully implemented, could drive about 20% of a company’s earnings.

Comet provides self-hosted and cloud-based MLOps solution that allows data scientists and engineers to track, compare, and optimize experiments and models. The ostensible aim is to deliver insights and data to build better, more accurate AI models while improving productivity, collaboration, and explainability across teams.

Comet supports code panels, an ecosystem of plugins, extensions, and visualizations built by the community and industry teams. It also offers tools like the aforementioned MPM, which is designed to provide visibility into model performance throughout a model’s lifecycle, from creation to production.

Comet has a rival in Weights and Biases, a provider of a platform for enabling collaboration and governance across teams building machine learning models. Among others, Domino Data Lab, a startup developing a platform focused on enterprises with large data science teams, is vying for a slice of the growing MLOps segment.

But Comet appears to have carved out a chunk of the expanding market. It claims to serve “thousands” of users and “multiple” Fortune 100 companies, with 500% revenue growth over the past year. And this latest funding round, which saw the participation of  Trilogy Equity Partners and Two Sigma Ventures, brings the New York-based company’s total raised to over $19 million.