Hewlett Packard Enterprise, better known as HPE, today announced that it has acquired Pachyderm, a startup developing a data science platform for “explainable and repeatable” AI. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed, and a purchase price was not disclosed. But HP said it plans to integrate Pachyderm’s capabilities into a platform that provides a pipeline to automatically prepare, track and manage machine learning processes.
Pachyderm’s software remains available to current and new customers — at least for now. The deal is not subject to regulatory approval and is likely to close later this month, HPE said.
Co-founded in 2014 by Joey Zwicker and former Airbnb software engineer Joe Doliner, Pachyderm provides tools for versioning (creating and managing) machine learning and AI projects at “enterprise scale.” Pachyderm’s cloud-based and on-premises products enable users to automate some aspects of AI system development through data transformations, data workflows, and connectors.
Pachyderm also provided version control capabilities for machine learning data sets and a “Git-like” structure that facilitated collaboration among data scientists, as well as the ability to generate an immutable record of all activity and assets on the platform. . It also hosted Pachyderm Hub, a fully managed service with an on-demand compute cluster for AI development.
Prior to the HPE acquisition, Pachyderm was able to raise $28.1 million in venture capital from backers including Benchmark, Microsoft’s M12, Y Combinator and HEP’s own Hewlett Packard Pathfinder. (Pathfinder invested in him in February 2022.) Among its customers were Shell, LogMeIn, Battelle Ecology, and AgBiome.
HPE believes Pachyderm will enhance its flagship AI development product, the HPE Machine Learning Development Environment. The HPE Machine Learning Development Environment provides software for building and training machine learning models for applications such as computer vision, natural language processing, and data analytics. In a press release, HPE described key benefits Pachyderm brings to tables, including incremental data processing, visibility into data provenance, and the ability to track different versions of data to understand when it was created or modified. I’m here.
“As AI projects grow in scale and involve increasingly complex data sets, data scientists need to efficiently maximize machine learning initiatives, optimize infrastructure costs, and access data anywhere in the AI journey. We need repeatable AI solutions to ensure the reliability and safety of our systems,” said Justin Hotard, HPE VP of High-Performance Computing (HPC) and AI, in a statement. increase. Pachyderm’s unique reproducible AI software enhances HPE’s existing large-scale AI offerings to automate and accelerate AI, delivering image, video, text analytics, generative AI, and other new large-scale language models. Extends the need to deliver transformational outcomes in the needs of “
Pachyderm is HPE’s second AI-related acquisition since Determined AI in June 2021. Similarly, Determined AI focused on creating a platform for building and retraining machine learning models.
HPE sees AI and HPC as potential key profit drivers, but the company is struggling to maintain momentum in an increasingly competitive market. In its fourth quarter 2022 earnings report, HPE’s HPC and AI revenues declined 14% year-over-year to $862 million, while operating margin fell to 3.5% from 14.2% a year ago. bottom.
