Machine Learning Startup Wallaroo Bags $25 Million in Series A Round Led by Microsoft’s M12

By Adriaan Brits | Thursday, 10 February 2022 | Startup, Tech

Enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) startup Wallaroo Labs announced it has bagged $25 million in a Series A funding round led by Microsoft’s venture arm, M12.

Focus on ML and AI

New business investors Ridgeline Partners and NSS Advisors, as well as returning investors Boldstart Ventures, Contour Venture Partners, Eniac Ventures, and Greycroft, participated in the latest funding round.

The startup company plans to use the fresh business funding to invest in the company’s product, sales, and marketing. In addition, the company expects to launch a free community edition of its product. 

“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,” added Jain.

Priyanka Mitra, Principal at M12, said Wallaroo Labs stands out from its competitors for multiple reasons, including customer obsession, the platform’s unique underlying technology, and more.

In addition to enabling businesses to deploy ML models into production easily, Wallaroo Labs also allows its customers to secure actual value during the process, Mitra added. Apart from financial support, M12 will also serve as Wallaroo Labs’s strategic advisor and provide it with access to Microsoft’s comprehensive global network.

Founded in 2014, the startup company has developed an innovative enterprise AI platform that utilizes ML technology and analytics to transform enterprise data into business results with incredible speed and at a low cost.

Wallaroo Labs collaborates with Fortune 500 companies across retail, finance, and manufacturing sectors. The startup company also partners with the US military to help them achieve their desired return on investment (ROI) on the company’s data and AI investments.

Furthermore, the platform can be integrated with any data environment such as cloud or on-premise software and allows data scientists to continue using any ML frameworks or products with Wallaroo.

Built from scratch, the platform allows easier-then-ever deployment of models and reduces computing costs by as much as 80% with batch or streaming analysis. The platform also informs the users about the existing system bottlenecks, data problems, or model underperformance.

In addition to the new business capital, Wallaroo also announced the launch of its new, sophisticated, observability features that allow users to identify model changes faster than ever. Using these new capabilities, clients are now able to set custom parameters to evaluate the model’s performance against a baseline, significantly enhancing anomalies and drift detection capabilities. It also improves validation checks.

The broad visibility and observability that the platform provides, alongside the groundbreaking analytics, will now help customers yield business results faster than before and at a lower cost.

Summary

AI and ML startup company Wallaroo Labs announced it has secured $25 million in a Series A funding round led by Microsoft’s venture arm, M12. The startup company will use the raised business funding to improve its operations (product, sales, and marketing) and roll out a free community edition of its product.

About the Author

Adriaan Brits

An analyst of global affairs, Adriaan has an MSC from Oxford, with diverse interests in the digital economy, entertainment, and business. He is a specialist trainer in advanced analytics and media.