Heavybit Welcomes New Member: Replicate

We’re excited to welcome our newest portfolio company, Replicate, a platform for sharing, tuning, and hosting open models. At Heavybit we believe that open models will become critical tools for enterprises to leverage Generative AI and LLMs both in their internal processes and the products they build. They provide compelling advantages in data privacy, fine-grained controls around capabilities and costs, as well as opportunities for the kind of community collaboration that we’ve seen in open-source software over the past 30 years. Replicate is a platform designed for technical practitioners to take existing open models, tune them, and then deploy to production-grade, serverless infrastructure with only a few lines of code.

Why We’re Excited

The founding team at Replicate deeply understands that as mind-blowing as all the demos, hacks and improvements have been over the last few years, real business value is created by moving from ideas and inspiration to working code and models running in production. Ben Firshman was the creator of Docker Compose, an industry standard for defining and running distributed apps and Andreas Jansson was a key driver in Spotify’s successful adoption of machine learning. Their deep understanding of the unique challenges at the intersection of generative AI and web engineering comes through in every part of the product. A great example of this is Cog, an open-source tool that lets you package machine learning models in a standard, production-ready container.

Replicate already serves an audience of more than 2 million users–with a rapidly growing count of paying customers numbering in the tens of thousands, but they are just getting started. As Replicate co-founder Firshman himself notes, “there are roughly two orders of magnitude more software engineers than there are machine learning engineers (~30 million vs. ~500,000). By building good tools, we think it is possible for software engineers to use machine learning in the same way they can use normal software.”

Looking ahead, the Replicate team will use its funding to improve the platform’s usability for organizations while optimizing performance and improving available models. Learn more about Replicate or get started running your own model now.

Meet the Founders

Ben Firshman

Co-Founder & CEO, Replicate

Ben Firshman is the CEO and co-founder of Replicate. A serial startup founder, he previously led open-source product at Docker and created Docker Compose, started numerous companies, and created software projects for The Guardian and the UK government.

Andreas Jansson

Co-Founder & CTO, Replicate

Andreas Jansson is the CTO and co-founder of Replicate. He has served tours of duty in engineering roles at a variety of companies, most recently as staff ML engineer at Spotify, where he and Ben discussed the need for a better way to package and ship open language models.