Anyscale Names Industry Veteran Keerti Melkote Chief Executive Officer
Anyscale, the company behind Ray, the open source framework for scalable AI, named industry veteran Keerti Melkote as chief executive officer following a year of 4x revenue growth and explosive open source adoption.
Melkote brings extensive experience in leading and scaling global technology organizations. After founding Aruba Networks in his garage in 2001, Melkote led the company through nearly two decades of growth, including its IPO in 2007, multi-billion dollar acquisition by HPE in 2015. Melkote continued to lead Aruba at HPE and also led HPE’s Intelligent Edge business helping transform it into a high-growth multi-billion dollar business.
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“AI represents a generational opportunity for enterprises to create value and differentiate themselves. However, AI workloads are very compute intensive and Anyscale’s founders created Ray as the software layer to easily scale AI workloads. Thanks to their vision, Ray now powers AI workloads such as training, inference, and data processing at companies ranging from Uber to Canva to Coinbase. I am excited to join Robert, Philipp, and Ion along with the incredibly talented team at Anyscale to capitalize on the head start Ray has in this emerging category of AI infrastructure.” – Keerti Melkote
“Anyscale has already assembled one of the premier teams in the critically important and rapidly growing AI Infrastructure market. By adding Keerti, the brilliant and successful former founder and CEO of Aruba Networks, Anyscale has the opportunity to become a truly special company.” – Ben Horowitz, Anyscale board member, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz
“We believe Anyscale is one of a few companies positioned to win in this rapidly evolving space. Very few entrepreneurs have founded a company and scaled it through every stage the way Keerti has. Keerti is the ideal leader to take Anyscale through its current and future stages of growth and ascension.” – Pete Sonsini, Anyscale board member, NEA
The amount of compute power needed to run AI workloads like model training, data processing, and model inference is growing astronomically. However, there are many hard software engineering challenges that need to be solved when running AI workloads in the cloud or across large GPU clusters, challenges spanning scalability, reliability, performance, and cost efficiency. Today, the leading AI companies like Google and Meta employ massive AI infrastructure teams to solve these challenges in-house. These challenges need to be solved for the industry as a whole, and that’s what Anyscale is solving.
Ray, the open source framework for scalable AI, was created by Ion Stoica, prior CEO Robert Nishihara, and Philipp Moritz out of UC Berkeley’s RISELab to solve the hard scaling challenges around AI. Today, Ray is growing 6x year over year, is used by over 50,000 developers, and is emerging as the open source standard for scaling AI. The trio founded Anyscale to commercialize Ray and to enable every business to move quickly to bring AI to production.
Examples of Ray successes include:
- Pinterest runs 5000 training jobs and 300 batch inference jobs every month on Ray.
- Runway used Ray to help build Gen-3 Alpha.
- OpenAI used Ray to train GPT-4.
- Uber standardized model training on Ray.
- Amazon processes exabytes of data with Ray.
- Ant Group serves over one million requests per second with Ray.
- Similar stories abound at Canva, ByteDance, Instacart, Spotify, Niantic, Samsara, Netflix, Airbnb, Shopify, Zoox, Snorkel, LinkedIn, Handshake, and many many more.
“As AI workloads make their way from exploration to production, the need for scale and the associated challenges are exploding. Keerti is a powerhouse and is the right leader to bring Anyscale into every enterprise and business that hopes to deploy AI. I’m overjoyed to be working with him and look forward to partnering in the years to come.” – Robert Nishihara. Nishihara will spearhead customer interactions and help shape product roadmap and strategy in his new role.
“The adoption of AI over the next few years will be unlike any technology shift we’ve seen so far. We are thrilled to have Keerti lead Anyscale. His deep background in technology and enterprise software are perfectly suited for navigating the unprecedented pace of innovation and change that we are experiencing.” – Ion Stoica, cofounder and executive chairman of Anyscale. In addition to cofounding Anyscale, Stoica is a UC Berkeley professor and was a co-founder and the first CEO at Databricks.
Anyscale will host its third annual in-person Ray Summit in San Francisco on October 1-2. Ray Summit is the industry conference on scalable AI. Speakers include:
- Mira Murati – CTO, OpenAI
- Anastasis Germanidis – Co-founder & CTO, Runway
- Marc Andreessen – Co-founder & General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz
- Joe Spisak – Head of Generative AI Open Source, Meta
- Harrison Chase – Co-founder & CEO, LangChain
- Jerry Liu – Co-founder & CEO, LlamaIndex
- John Bicket – Co-founder & CTO, Samsara
- Stephen MacKinnon – VP Applied Machine Learning, Recursion
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