U.S. startup co-founded by Romanian raises USD 40 million funding

U.S.-based Anyscale, a distributed computing startup, raised last week USD 40 million in a series B funding led by investment fund NEA.

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Foundation Capital, and Intel Capital also took part in the funding series, according to a releaseon Business Wire.

Last week’s funding adds to the USD 20.6 million the company attracted in December 2019.

Anyscale enables developers of all skill levels to easily build applications that run at any scale, from a laptop to the cloud. It allows organizations to bring AI applications to production faster, reduce development costs, and eliminate the need for in-house expertise to build, deploy, and manage these applications.

Anyscale will use the funding to further grow the ecosystem around the Ray open source project, it said.

The company was founded by the creators of Ray, an open-source framework for running distributed computing projects. They are Romanian Ion Stoica, Robert Nishihara, and Philipp Moritz.

Ion Stoica is a professor at UC Berkeley. He trained as an engineer in Romania and received a M.S. in electrical engineering and informatics from the Bucharest Polytechnic University in 1989, Startupcafe.ro reported. He received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University.

Stoica previously co-founded Databricks, a unified platform for massive-scale data engineering, collaborative data science, full-lifecycle machine learning and business analytics, and Conviva, providing solutions for online video optimization and online video analytics.

(Photo: Sarayut Thanerat/ Dreamstime)