BentoML, an AI development framework, announced the completion of a $9 million seed round of financing, led by DCM Venture Capital and participated by Bow Capital; the funds will be used to expand the product system and improve product levels. Hurst Lin, general partner of DCM , joined BentoML's board of directors following this funding round.
BentoML is a developer platform focused on AI applications founded in 2019, headquartered in San Francisco; its co-founder and CEO Yang Chaoyu was an early software engineer at Databricks. BentoML provides a high-level API that abstracts away the details of the infrastructure required to run AI models on the cloud, aiming to make developing AI services smoother. Specifically, BentoML targets data scientists who train AI models, DevOp engineers who manage their lifecycle, and developers who actually build applications on top of the models.
In an interview with TechCrunch , Yang Chaoyu said that with BentoML, developers can make Visual ChatGPT scalable and cost-effective for production use in just two days. Users can also use the framework to run Stable Diffusion and open source LLMs in the cloud.
He also compared BentoML to Vercel, the developer behind the Next.js framework , saying that BentoML aims to be the Vercel of artificial intelligence. In 2021, Vercel announced the completion of a US$150 million Series D round of financing, with a valuation of US$2.5 billion .
Yang Chaoyu predicts that AI application developers will account for more than 90% of platform users in the future. “If you had asked me a year ago, I would have said that maybe 90% of companies would train their own models, but the underlying models that have emerged recently are so powerful that they can perform well even given a never-before-seen dataset. Instead of focusing on model training, developers now only need to do fine-tuning and product engineering; this in itself constitutes a bottleneck because there is a shortage of AI-focused developers.”
And revealed that the booming AI market is a boon for BentoML, but the rapidly changing industry also makes it difficult for the team to balance short-term and long-term goals. “You may have to build something that follows current trends, but in the long run, of course we want to have our own moat. The question is how do we balance time and human resources between the two.”