Orchest gathers $3.5m seed

Orchest, a Dutch open source data science platform, has raised $3.5 million in seed funding. Gradient Ventures and Basis Set Ventures led the round.

PRESS RELEASE

The Netherlands— Date TBD, 2021— Orchest, a new open source data science platform, today announces $3.5 million in seed funding. Currently in private beta for select companies, Orchest removes the need for a company to have a MLOps team. The seed round is co-led by Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI-focused venture fund, and Basis Set Ventures, with prior pre-seed investment from angels Pete Soderling, founder of Data Council, Anthony Goldbloom, founder of Kaggle and others. Chang Xu from Basis Set Ventures will join Orchest’s board.

Co-Founders Rick Lamers and Yannick Perrenet met at university and created Orchest in 2020 as a way to contribute to the emerging field of data science and machine learning. Rick previously founded Grid Studio, another open-sourced project that became viral with 5,000 + GitHub Stars within the first few weeks of its release. That project served as inspiration for Orchest’s open source project and managed hosted offering.

“We hope to become the data science platform within companies that alleviates the need for a data infrastructure team. The response on our private cloud beta has been substantial with 100 + companies that have applied. We’re pleased to have the expertise and support from our investors to further develop the open source project and an enterprise edition that fulfills the needs of larger teams and companies,” said Rick Lamers, CEO and Co-Founder of Orchest.

Orchest, a cloud native IDE tailored to the new reality of running data science projects in a cloud environment, allows teams to build pipelines iteratively by editing and connecting notebooks and scripts. It abstracts away infrastructure concerns to let the data science team focus on data & algorithms.

“Orchest provides an intuitive drag-and-drop interface to manage, build and train ML workflows, without data scientists having to leave their IDE environment. We met Rick and Yannick over a year ago and are continually impressed by their resourcefulness and resolve to build a category defining company,” said Anna Patterson, Managing Partner at Gradient Ventures.

With the new capital, Orchest will hire for additional international engineering and marketing positions, such as cloud infrastructure and developer relations roles, with plans to launch a public beta later this year.

“Rick and Yannick stand out as exceptional founders and we’re excited to support them after observing the initial market traction that their product earned. Tooling for data scientists is an underexplored area; we’re confident Orchest will make a dent in this fast-growing market to become the tool that every data scientist uses,” said Lan Xuezhao, Founding and Managing Partner of Basis Set Ventures.

To learn more about Orchest and sign up for its private beta, visit: https://www.orchest.io

About Orchest
Based in The Netherlands, Orchest is a new open source data science platform. Co-Founders Rick Lamers and Yannick Perrenet created Orchest in 2020 as a way to contribute to the emerging field of data science and machine learning. The company has raised $4.15 million in funding to date from investors such as Gradient Ventures and Basis Set Ventures. For more information, visit https://www.orchest.io/