Our Investment in Qwak - The Machine Learning Engineering Platform

Today, we’re excited to announce that Leaders Fund is leading a $15M Series A funding round into Qwak, a Machine Learning (ML) Engineering platform that helps companies 10x their ML organization’s throughput.

Qwak’s founders are a team of software/ML engineers and designers. In their roles leading ML teams at Payoneer, Wix and AWS they saw that when designed, built and deployed correctly, ML based products could deliver smarter, more valuable solutions to end customers. The breakthroughs they saw when deploying ML based products were significant, so the desire to add more talent and ML output increased. 

Their quest to scale ML throughout their products ran into a number of challenges though. Firstly, hiring data scientists and ML engineers was extremely difficult and costly. Furthermore, once those people were hired, they lacked the tools and solutions to effectively manage the ML lifecycle from the point at which a model was ready to be deployed, to building all the infrastructure required to run ML based products at scale. Their ability to move from model design to model implementation was severely constrained, ultimately slowing them down and decreasing productivity.

They each respectively searched for tools that could help augment their teams in helping move from model design to model implementation and scaling, but after finding a series of point solutions that required hiring more people, not less, they decided to build it internally themselves. 

After seeing the benefits, they realized that not all companies had the resources that large companies had to build an internal ML orchestration solution, but most had a desire to increase the value delivered to end customers using ML. While 9 out of 10 executives believe that adopting ML is crucial to complete, only 1 out of every 10 models actually make it to production. Most companies in the world were experiencing this similar problem - that inability to take ideas, configure ML models, run them in production in a reasonable time frame and scale the iteration/throughput of their teams.

It was out of this experience that Qwak was born. Qwak’s mission is to build the ML Engineering platform accessible to any company looking to deploy ML based products. Qwak’s solution eliminates internal bottlenecks and accelerates ML throughput through ML orchestration and automation. 

By automating the key MLOps steps required to deploy and run ML based products at scale, Qwak dramatically increases the output of ML teams without slowing them down, ultimately driving more value to end customers through rapid iteration and more ML based products. World-leading companies like Yotpo, Guesty, Skyline AI and JLL are using Qwak today to scale their ML output, saving them time and from having to build this internally. 

We’re also excited to join Nate Meir of Stage One Ventures and Modi Rosen of Amiti Ventures in supporting the Qwak team in their journey.

To learn more about how Qwak helps companies build more ML-driven products faster, visit Qwak.com.