Valohai, a machine learning (ML) platform-as-a-service company, has raised $1.8 million in funding to help international companies accelerate machine learning development and scale their model deployment. The round was led by Nordic seed stage investment company Superhero Capital, with participation from Reaktor Ventures and Business Finland, the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation.
The Valohai platform automates the ML training and deployment infrastructure for companies who are looking to increase their business efficiency by leveraging machine learning. This scalable solution allows companies to run multiple variations of machine learning ideas in parallel, leaving developers free to focus on pushing the boundaries of their research with minimal idle time.
Eero Laaksonen, CEO and co-founder of Valohai stated: “Currently, every company starting with large-scale machine learning needs to build a lot of overhead infrastructure before they can apply deep learning to solve the actual problem. By providing a standardized infrastructure and workflow, we help companies focus on the actual business driving machine learning models instead of the infrastructure.”
The initial setup period for conventional machine learning can take as long as two years, which is a significant hurdle for many companies to clamber over. The Valohai platform requires no setup, meaning companies can start building large-scale ML models immediately.
Marko Sibakov, Business Development Director at Reaktor commented: “We love using Valohai in our machine learning projects, and the results have been substantial. Valohai has enabled us to significantly speed up the development process of our autonomous model ferry project. We saved valuable time in the setup process which could then be reallocated to the development of the machine learning itself.”
The platform is designed to be used for peer review and open-source collaboration. Unlike many other machine learning environments, the Valohai system can track changes, build reproducible algorithms, and ensure changes in team composition do not hinder the experiment process.
Valohai was founded in 2016 in Turku (Finland) by a team of engineers with backgrounds in various software development companies including San Francisco-based Leap Motion. The company has customers in Europe, Asia, and the USA and plans to further scale the team and accelerate product development.
