Microsoft Venture Firm Leads $25 Million in Wallaroo

NEW YORK — Wallaroo Labs, Inc., has closed a $25 million Series A round led by Microsoft’s venture arm, M12. Wallaroo helps enterprises easily deploy, run, and observe Machine Learning (ML) models in production at scale so they actually impact the bottom line. New investors Ridgeline Partners and NSS Advisors joined existing seed investors Boldstart Ventures, Contour Venture Partners, Eniac Ventures, and Greycroft as part of the round. Wallaroo will use the funds to expand product, sales, and marketing, and to release a free community edition.

“Machine learning is hard, and the last mile of ML – getting it deployed and delivering value – is really hard. 85 percent of enterprise initiatives fail at it,” said Vid Jain, Founder and CEO of Wallaroo Labs. “We purpose-built Wallaroo to solve these last mile challenges. As more companies look to operationalize ML for the first time, and others grow their current ML investments to become a fully mature capability at scale, conquering ML’s last mile will quickly become their top priority. This new funding gives us the resources to help them deliver on the promise of AI.”

“At M12, we’re constantly speaking to machine learning software companies, and Wallaroo really stood out to us from the start on a number of dimensions, ranging from their customer obsession to the technical differentiation of their platform,” said Priyanka Mitra, Principal at M12. “Not only does Wallaroo solve the challenging problem of enabling enterprises to more seamlessly deploy machine learning models into production at scale, it also enables customers to achieve actual business value in the process. Wallaroo has the potential to become a standard component in the ML toolchain. We’re excited to be joining them on their journey.”

In addition to capital, M12 will be providing Wallaroo with invaluable strategic guidance and access to Microsoft’s global network.

Wallaroo is already working with the US Military and some of the largest brands in the world to help them deliver ROI on their data and AI investments. Use cases include security, fraud, pricing, marketing, NLP, recommendations, computer vision, manufacturing, marketing, and enterprise AI-as-a-service.

Wallaroo plugs into any data environment (cloud, on-prem, or edge), while data scientists can continue to use their favorite tools and ML frameworks. Wallaroo enables:

• Easy deployment of models with a single line of Python
• 80% lower compute costs with either batch or streaming analysis
• Rapid detection of model underperformance, system bottlenecks, or data issues