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

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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.

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