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Announcing LastMile AI’s $10MM Seed Round from Gradient
We are excited to announce our $10MM raise led by Gradient, Google’s AI-focused venture fund, with participation from Jerry Yang, Guillermo Rauch, Exceptional Capital, FirstHand Alliance, 10x Founders and others. Read more on TechCrunch.
We are a team of technologists and friends from Meta/Facebook AI. We built many of the core developer tools that thousands of ML engineers and data scientists rely on everyday within Meta — including Bento, a custom-built Jupyter notebook platform; Mastercook, a collaborative experimentation platform for Ads ranking; and ML Hub, Facebook’s model and feature management platform. We’ve seen firsthand the multiplicative role that good developer tools play in making ML teams more productive, resulting in better products that are easier to iterate.
With recent advances in foundation models and generative AI, we are witnessing the start of a profound revolution in computing that will fundamentally change our relationship with technology. This revolution is being driven by software engineers and product teams who are using AI as a new part of their software toolkit. Yet ML developer tooling is still mostly geared towards researchers and core ML practitioners.
To drive the last mile adoption of AI across every industry, we need a new class of AI developer tools built for software engineers, not just ML research scientists.
Our team has lived and breathed developer tools for the better part of a decade, and we are incredibly excited to make AI more accessible to more teams, businesses and engineers. Our vision is for LastMile to be the integrated development environment for generative AI, allowing you to experiment with, personalize and deploy foundation models for enterprise applications and workflows. It shouldn’t matter what models you use, how many steps are in your AI workflow, or what application you’re using them for — there should be a single, cohesive developer environment for working with AI, and we intend to build it.
AI has been ‘the next big thing’ for many years, but its promise has largely remained unfulfilled. Until now, leveraging AI required deep expertise and investment, from data preparation and feature engineering to training, evaluation and inference. An organization needed to build sophisticated ML research and infrastructure engineering teams just to get started. So it is no surprise that AI remained the domain of only the most sophisticated tech companies, and remained ‘the next big thing’ for everyone else.
Like many others, we believe the proliferation of advanced foundation models — especially large language models, but also audio, image and video models — is a game changer for the mass adoption of AI. LLMs and other generative AI models are general-purpose enough that any organization with a software engineering team can start incorporating AI in their applications and workflows. Chatbots really showcased the capabilities of these models, but their value extends far beyond. Already we have seen our design partners use LLMs in production for NLP, classification, intent recognition, data annotation and information retrieval.
AI application development today is scattered and disjointed across a mish-mash of tools, libraries and frameworks. We think it needs to be more structured and streamlined.
Any developer loop has 4 key phases:
Inner Dev Loop: Rapid prototyping, experimenting and iteration
Outer Dev Loop: Offline workflows and results evaluation
Deployment: Getting things in production
Monitoring: Observability, logging and feedback loop
For AI application development, these phases map to:
Simply put, some combination of these steps is required to leverage AI in your application. Today each of these steps requires stitching together a number of different tools and providers, and needs nuanced understanding of every step, which increases the barrier to entry.
Our goal with LastMile is to provide a single developer platform that encompasses the entire lifecycle of AI application development.
To that effect, we’re taking 3 opinionated design choices:
Model-agnostic.
An AI developer platform should enable experimenting with a variety/combination of model providers. We don’t think there will be a single dominant model provider that serves every purpose for everyone.End-to-end.
A cohesive developer experience should encompass the entire AI application development lifecycle. If it requires putting together different solutions for different steps, then it’s already too complicated.Built for software engineers and product teams.
For mass adoption of AI, we need a developer platform for engineers and application developers, not just researchers.
Our first product, AI Workbooks, is a notebook interface for experimenting with generative AI models. It simplifies the inner dev loop dramatically. Give it a try today.
Gradient is Google’s AI-focused fund. From our very first conversation with Asif and Darian, we felt a mind-meld both about the transformative potential of generative AI, and about how lastmile could help turbocharge that transformation across industries. We’re incredibly excited to be part of the Gradient family.
We’re scaling up our design partnerships as we continue to build out the LastMile developer platform. If you are evaluating generative AI to solve specific business challenges, we would love to work with you.
You can read more about our Extra Mile Design Partner program. Please reach out to us if you’d like to participate.
Our journey is not even 1% finished. A comprehensive AI developer platform is such an undertaking that many people think we’re being too ambitious. We take that as a point of pride, because trying to do hard and innovative things gives our work meaning. Sharing that ambition and vision with an incredible team gives us purpose.
We’re hiring, so if our vision appeals to you, please consider applying.
Let’s get started!
