One of the biggest challenges facing the AI community today is developing accurate enough models that can provide real value for a product or business. Comet, an Israeli startup providing MLOps solutions, secured $13 million in Series A funding from a number of investors, including Amazon Alexa Fund.

Just like the App Store

Comet develops an MLOps platform for managing models and AI/ML experiments. The platform helps customers and users manage the entire model development life cycle - starting from tracking fed data, code, experiments, results, and the quality of models once deployed in the production space.

While chatting with Geektime, co-founder and CEO Gideon Mendels told us that what makes the product unique was that the platform is flexible, allowing customers to adapt it to their needs with two lines of code: “Essentially, Comet shares functional similarities to the App Store. These are called Code Panels, which give third-party developers or enterprise development teams freedom to add different functions, change the product, and seamlessly implement the platform into the organizational network.”

UK acquisition

Comet was founded in 2017 by Gideon Mendels and Nimrod Lahav. Mendels previously led Google’s AI models focused on identifying hate speech on YouTube; Lahav previously led the R&D team at Wix. Among the company’s customers we find major market leaders like Etsy, Uber, Zappos, Boeing, Ancestry, along with other Fortune 500 companies. Comet’s headquarters are based in NYC, but recently opened an Israel-based R&D center, with further plans to expand down the road.

The Series A round was led by Scale Venture Partners, which had previously backed other Israeli Unicorns such as Forter, Papaya Global, JFrog, and BigID. Comet’s existing investors Trilogy Equity Partners and Two Sigma Ventures also got in on the action. Additionally, joining the party was Alexa, well the $200 million Amazon Alexa Fund to be exact, which invests in AI and voice recognition ventures.

In addition to the funding, Comet announced the acquisition of Stakion, a model production monitoring company based in the U.K. The acquisition supports Comet’s newest product innovation, Comet Model Production Monitoring, which will enable organizations to track and monitor the quality of models after they have been deployed in production.