The demand for AI in the enterprise is insatiable, but the challenge lies in building the infrastructure to support and its development and maintenance. A 2020 IDC survey found that a shortage of data to train AI and low-quality data remain major barriers to implementing it, along with data security, governance, performance, and latency issues. In fact, a third of enterprises responding to the poll report spending around a third of their AI lifecycle time on data integration and prep versus actual data science efforts. 

Josh Tobin, a former research scientist at OpenAI, observed the trend firsthand while teaching a deep learning course at UC Berkeley in 2019 with Vicki Cheung. He and Cheung saw the history of AI reaching an inflection point: Over the previous ten years, companies invested in AI to keep up with tech trends or help with analytics. Yet, despite some vendors declaring the 'democratization of AI,' it remained very difficult for most companies to build AI-powered products.

"The main challenge in building or adopting infrastructure for machine learning is that the field moves incredibly quickly. For example, natural language processing was considered out of reach for industrial applications just a few years ago, but is rapidly becoming commonplace today," Tobin said. "That's why we're building a continuous machine learning improvement platform."

Tobin and Cheung, who formerly headed infrastructure at OpenAI and was a founding engineer at Duolingo, are the co-founders of Gantry, a service that aims to help AI development teams decide when to retrain their AI systems and which data to use during retraining. Tobin claims that Gantry, which connects to existing apps, data labeling services, and data storage, can summarize and visualize data during the training, evaluation, and deployment stages.

Gantry today emerged from stealth with $28.3 million, a combination of a $23.9 million Series A round and previously undisclosed $4.4 million seed round. Amplify and Coatue co-led the Series A alongside investors including OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman and Pieter Abbeel, the co-founder of industrial robotics startup Covariant.