TrueFoundry Raises Funding From Sequoia’s Surge, Others To Help Enterprises Deploy ML

Machine learning (ML) developer platform TrueFoundry has raised $2.3 Mn in its seed funding round led by Sequoia India and Southeast Asia’s Surge. The round also saw participation from Eniac Ventures and angel investors such as AngelList cofounder Naval Ravikant.

The fresh capital will be utilised to expand the startup’s specialised technology team and further product development.

In a statement, TrueFoundry said that 90% of ML models do not end up in production. For the models that make it to deployment, 50% fail due to absence of monitoring systems and 30% have to be reverted due to scaling and latency issues that are often overlooked during the data training stage. 

While larger enterprises can bridge this gap by deploying large, high-end ML platform teams to design and launch ML models, it is not feasible for smaller companies and startups to commit such high investments while building their companies.

Against this backdrop, TrueFoundry was born out of the idea that no business – big or small – should miss out on the opportunities of machine learning, its cofounder and CEO Nikunj Bajaj said. 

“With our automated platform, data scientists and engineers are able to deploy machine learning models at the speed and maturity of big tech, cutting their production timelines from several weeks to a few hours,” he added. 

 TrueFoundry claims that its platform enables ML teams to be 10x faster. From Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Tensorflow to Kubernetes, TrueFoundry is platform agnostic and integrates with existing stack for seamless implementation. ML developers need less than five minutes to put models into production, the startup said.

India and US-based TrueFoundry was founded in June 2021 by Abhishek Choudhary, Anuraag Gutgutia and Bajaj. Choudhary and Bajaj earlier worked at Facebook. During their time at Facebook, the co-founders recognised that smaller companies in-market need significantly longer time to build and deploy machine learning models as compared to big tech companies. 

This led to the founding of TrueFoundry which automates repetitive tasks in the ML pipeline to accelerate ML deployment and for live endpoint monitoring.

The enterprisetech sector is growing fast in the country and has minted 20 unicorns so far, including listed companies Freshworks and MapmyIndia. Enterprisetech startups raised $11.66 Bn across 1,390 deals between 2014 and Q2 2022, according to Inc42 data. 

Recently, data analytics startup Sigmoid raised $12 Mn in funding in a Series B round led by Sequoia India.