Verta has just come out of stealth and raised $10 million.

Verta, a startup founded by MIT CSAIL graduate Manasi Vartak, develops software to help data science teams manage their Machine Learning (ML) models.

“Between the difficulty of managing model versions, rewriting research models for production, and streamlining data ingest, the development and deployment of production-ready models is a frustrating struggle for small and large companies alike,” Verta says on its website.

The startup’s Verta MLOps software supports model development, deployment, operations, monitoring, and collaboration. This enables data scientists to manage models across their lifecycle.

The backbone of Verta MLOps is ModelDB, the first open-source modern model management system. Vartak created ModelDB during her Ph.D. at MIT’s CSAIL lab.

Verta announced Tuesday its Series A funding of $10 million. Intel Capital led the round with participation from General Catalyst who led the seed round. (Intrado GlobeNewsWire)

AI operational burdens on data science teams

“As the AI/ML market expands rapidly, data science teams are becoming overburdened,” said Mike Leone, senior analyst at ESG. “They’re tasked with solving strategic business problems, but several non-data science tasks bog them down: data integration, data quality, cumbersome checkpoints; governance/compliance; learning intricacies of technology in the operational stack, like Kubernetes. This is where Verta can help by taking on the AI operational burdens data science teams face and enabling them to concentrate on strategy, innovation, and what they were hired for: data science.”

Well-known global brands use the startup’s system, including one of the world’s leading workplace collaboration tools.

According to one customer, Verta cut the time to deploy a model from six months to multiple times every month.

“By monitoring model performance, data drift and service levels across deployment environments—including Verta’s Inference Engine, AWS SageMaker, and other domain-specific systems—Verta ensures model-based applications continue to perform at their best, and can be rapidly refreshed as and when needed,” Verta said in a statement.

Verta’s ModelDB-based model catalog and governance mechanisms are useful for enterprises with large-scale model management needs. These enable them to keep track of model designs, deployment approvals, and full traceability audits.

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