It was recently announced that Logical Clocks raised 5 million euros from Industrifonden and Inventure to accelerate international growth. Logical Clocks offers Hopsworks, a state of the art platform that includes the industry’s leading Feature Store for machine learning, and a data science platform for the design and operation of machine learning workflows. They already have several large international clients such as AGL Australia, Wildlife Studios and SparkNZ. Logical Clocks is experiencing fast growth that will increase further with the recent investment.
At Industrifonden, we believe in the transformational power of AI and that the hype cycle we have seen will turn into a new era of machine learning actually being applied on a much broader scale, in everything from solutions to global challenges such as the climate crisis to improving everyday business decisions (see our AI-investment thesis here). Logical Clocks’ platform, called Hopsworks, solves many of the problems ML initiatives face today. Therefore, supporting Logical Clocks journey in enabling the operationalization of AI will radically accelerate the use of AI in many industries.
In 2011, Marc Andressen coined the expression “Software is eating the world”. Ten years later, we believe it is time for AI to eat software. However, so far what we are seeing is that too many companies are failing in their early machine learning initiatives, especially in getting models into production and generating value or reducing costs for the business1. Problems in managing data for training and serving models, disconnected teams, as well as not having a complete solution for automated machine learning workflows, are some of the issues leading to the slow and, often unsuccessful, adoption of machine learning.
Companies are investing large amounts of money into trying to resolve some of these issues and deal with the ongoing explosion in data. Typically, before tackling AI, companies first build a foundation for a modern data infrastructure, with support for scalable and often real-time analysis. This investment in data infrastructure is expected to accelerate coming years2. As the market for data infrastructure and AI technologies matures and grows, companies need more and better access to innovative AI models, applications and platforms. Unless AI models are in production, there is no return on investment.
Meet Logical Clocks and their platform, Hopsworks
Hopsworks is a platform for the design and operation of AI systems. It is designed to solve many of these challenges and pain points, providing a centralized ML platform with the industry’s most advanced and high performance Feature Store. This enables organizations to manage models with low latency access to data spanning the whole organization. With Hopsworks, companies can easily deploy real-time features (features are the clean, information-rich data used to train and make predictions with models), govern models with custom metadata and built-in data provenance, and increase effectiveness and collaboration across data and ML teams.
In other words, Hopsworks introduces a pivotal technology that streamlines the management of features, making it simpler, faster, and cheaper to move models to production. Hopsworks’ was built on a principle of being an open platform that allows data teams to choose their tools and deployment environment, either on-premises or as a managed platform in the cloud.
Hopsworks is available both on-premises and as a managed service on AWS and Azure today. It supports Python and Spark environments for feature engineering and model training, and it connects with the largest number of data storage and data science tools. The platform offers two product tiers: the open-source Community version that targets individuals or small organizations that want to try the Hopsworks Feature Store, and the Enterprise version that provides security and integrations to support organizations in building production machine learning applications at scale.
With this funding round, Logical Clocks will accelerate its international mission to help enterprises implement and manage AI-models at scale. We are extremely impressed with the team’s grit, strong research background, and technical skills. We could not be more excited and honored to partner with Jim, Theo, Fabio and the other eight founders on the next stage of the company’s journey!
/ Rebecka Löthman Rydå, Investment Director
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/gilpress/2020/01/13/ai-stats-news-only-146-of-firms-have-deployed-ai-capabilities-in-production/?sh=12b869282650
- https://www.slideshare.net/delphixdecks/90-of-enterprises-are-using-dataops-why-arent-you
