PRESS RELEASE

DevSentient Rebrands as Shakudo and announces a US$3.4M seed round November 3, 2021

Shakudo, a disruptive end-to-end machine learning platform provider, has raised a US$3.4M seed round. Previously called DevSentient, Shakudo’s funding and rebrand comes as the company becomes a leading challenger in the Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) space.

The round was 40% oversubscribed and was led by Golden Ventures and Parade Ventures, with participation from Global Founders Capital, Garage Capital, Draft Ventures, Basecamp Fund and angel investors including Anton Rabie (Spinmaster), Ivan Yuen (Wattpad), Dave Rai (Nymi), Chanda Carr (The Group Ventures) and others. In total, Shakudo has raised US$3.9M since inception.

“Most businesses recognize the power of data and data science, but struggle to effectively tie this capability to direct ROI,” said Yevgeniy Vahlis, Shakudo’s CEO. “With the latest round of funding we’re able to expand the interoperability and frictionless data science that our platform provides to businesses in all industries.”

Through the use of Shakudo’s platform, Hyperplane, companies get their products to market faster and better, significantly reducing their reliance on expensive engineering talent and Development Operations (DevOps) to support their data science teams. Hyperplane requires no additional capital investment and leverages the existing tools.

Shakudo disrupts the end-to-end machine learning platform space by approaching the problem as a user experience (UX) challenge of creating a unified environment that makes it easy to use the multitude of powerful open-source point solutions in the space. Hyperplane offers data scientists and engineers a familiar experience using the tools that they already love, with many of the common engineering and DevOps tasks fully automated and one click away.

The company was founded by an experienced team of machine learning experts, Yevgeniy Vahlis, Christine Yuen, and Stella Wu, who have previously scaled up AI teams at Borealis AI, RBC, Bank of Montreal AI, and Georgian Partners. The founders witnessed firsthand the tremendous growth of and potential for data science projects, but lack of engineering teams and infrastructure to support the development & testing of AI products. As a result Shakudo was born, purpose-built to help AI practitioners go from research to market in a matter of days.

“Shakudo’s vision is to fundamentally change how data science and machine learning are operationalized within a company. I’m excited about the large-scale impact of their platform. This is a world class team with deep expertise in building ML solutions for industry.” said Jamie Rosenblat. Jamie is a Partner at Golden Ventures and the lead investor in Shakudo’s seed round. “We’re seeing a lot of activity in the MLOps and data science platforms space. There is an element of saturation on the buyers side. Shakudo’s approach cuts through the noise, providing an interoperable and extensible platform that will survive the test of time because it evolves with the industry instead of focusing on a single tool or methodology.” said Shawn Merani, Managing Partner at Parade Ventures and co-lead on the round.

Today, Shakudo’s customers and partners rely on the platform to accelerate their data science efforts through ML Engineering and MLOps automation.

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