Cake’s mission is for businesses of any size to readily deploy the latest technologies without requiring a large number of engineers.
With the rollout of AI impacting one business sector after another, one wonders what areas or companies will be left behind. Recently funded Cake addresses that concern with the launch of its open-source AI infrastructure platform enabling all businesses to deploy the latest technologies cost-effectively.
“Companies in every sector are investing in the latest technologies with an eye toward winning in their markets with AI,” said Misha Herscu, CEO and co-founder of Cake. “Unfortunately, the cutting-edge has historically been the exclusive domain of large ML engineering teams. At Cake, we’re working to ensure that businesses of any size can confidently deploy the latest technologies, within days, or even hours, and without requiring an army of engineers.”
Cake quickly caught the attention of Gradient, Google’s early-stage AI Fund, which led the company’s recent $13 million Seed round.
“As early investors in AI companies such as Lambda Labs, Writer, Streamlit, and many others, we’ve seen businesses of all sizes struggle to deploy models and AI tools into production,” said Darian Shirazi, Managing Partner at Gradient. “When we first met the team at Cake, it was incredible to see the number of customers deeply engaged with their solution.”
Herscu’s background in deploying innovative technology runs deep. A seasoned entrepreneur and software engineer, he founded McCoy Medical Technologies in 2016 which was acquired two years later. He then took key software engineering positions in technology-driven companies before co-founding Cake in 2022 with Skyler Thomas who previously was the Distinguished Technologist/Director of Strategy of Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
The team quickly gained pre-seed funding support from Primary Venture Partners which joined the latest round with Alumni Ventures, Friends & Family Capital, Correlation Ventures, Firestreak Ventures, and numerous industry-veteran individual investors.
Based in New York City Cake accelerates AI initiatives with a platform enabling the seamless deployment, integration, and management of dozens of popular open-source AI technologies. It offers a curated selection of pre-integrated and fully-managed open-source AI components that businesses of all sizes can use to deploy AI into production far faster and more easily than possible before Cake.
Cake brings two major benefits to its target clients. The cost-effectiveness of its platform lowers the barrier to entry around state-of-the-art AI for companies held back by engineering bandwidth. Customers also stay on the AI frontier with a platform architecture focused on continuously integrating the latest breakthroughs.
“Our partnership with Cake has been a clear strategic choice – we’re achieving the impact of two to three technical hires with the equivalent investment of half an FTE,” says Scott Stafford, CTO of Ping Data Intelligence, an insurtech platform powered by machine learning. “Staying at the forefront of AI advancements is essential for us, even as a young company, to remain competitive and agile.”
A range of business sectors forms the target customer base for Cake’s platform, financial services, healthcare, insurtech, e-commerce, and traditional SaaS—that already rely on Cake. They know that new technologies are being incorporated as they emerge.
“Misha and Skyler have not only built a product customers want, they’re also extremely dedicated to listening, collaborating, and learning from non-technical companies looking to deploy AI into production,” said Shirazi.
