HPE acquires Pachyderm to bolster its AI development offerings

Hewlett Packard Enterprise, the company better known as HPE, today announcement that he acquired Pachyderm, a startup developing a data science platform for “explainable, reproducible” AI. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, nor was the purchase price. But HP said it plans to integrate Pachyderm’s capabilities into a platform that will provide a pipeline to automatically prepare, track and manage machine learning processes.

Pachyderm’s software will remain available to current and new customers, at least for now. HPE says the transaction is not subject to any regulatory approval and will likely close this month.

Co-founded in 2014 by Joey Zwicker and Joe Doliner, a former Airbnb software engineer, Pachyderm provides tools for versioning (i.e. creating and managing) machine learning projects and Enterprise-scale AI. Using Pachyderm’s cloud-based and on-premises products, users could automate certain aspects of AI system development through data transformations, data workflows, and connectors.

Pachyderm also offered versioning features for machine learning datasets and a “Git-like” structure to facilitate collaboration between data scientists, as well as the ability to generate an immutable record for all activities. and all platform assets. It also hosted Pachyderm Hub, a fully managed service with an on-demand compute cluster for AI development.

Prior to the HPE acquisition, Pachyderm was successful in attracting $28.1 million in venture capital from backers including Benchmark, Microsoft’s M12, Y Combinator and HEP’s Hewlett Packard Pathfinder. (Pathfinder invested in February 2022.) Its clients included Shell, LogMeIn, Battelle Ecology and AgBiome.

HPE sees Pachyderm bolster its flagship AI development product, HPE Machine Learning Development Environment, which provides software to build and train machine learning models for applications such as computer vision, natural language processing, and computer science. ‘data analysis. In a press release, HPE outlines what it sees as the key benefits Pachyderm brings to the table, including incremental data processing, visibility into data origin, and the ability to track different versions of data to understand when they were created or modified.

“As AI projects become larger and increasingly involve complex datasets, data scientists will need repeatable AI solutions to effectively maximize their machine learning initiatives, optimize their infrastructure and ensure data is reliable and safe no matter where it is in its AI journey,” HPE Vice President of High Performance Computing (HPC) and AI Justin Hotard said in a statement. communicated. “Pachyderm’s unique reproducible AI software augments HPE’s existing large-scale AI offerings to automate and accelerate AI and unlock greater opportunities in image, video and text analysis, l Generative AI and other emerging needs for large language models to achieve transformative results.

Pachyderm is HPE’s second AI-related acquisition since Determined AI in June 2021. Determined AI, similarly, focused on creating a platform for building and recycling machine learning models.

HPE sees AI and HPC as an important potential profit driver, but the company is struggling to maintain momentum in an increasingly competitive market. In its fourth quarter 2022 results reportHPE’s HPC and AI revenues fell 14% year-on-year to $862 million, bringing operating margin to 3.5% from 14.2% a year earlier.

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