AI for All: How Cake is Democratizing Production-Grade AI

AI via API isn’t a panacea for AI. Yes, anyone can connect GPT or Claude to a v1 application and produce miraculous results. State-of-the-art frontier models are, well, miraculous. However, building an application that can drive real business value at scale is vastly more complex and expensive than building a demo for Twitter.

Additionally, most of the true power of AI has nothing to do with LLMs. Primarily, AI drives value with features that don’t inspire awe but rather drive ROI with behind-the-scenes business use cases. This class of AI is often more challenging than deploying LLMs.

In both cases, only an elite group of companies has the resources to drive cutting-edge AI to production with confidence.

Since ChatGPT launched, a myriad of solutions have come to market attempting to make AI “easy,” but the truth is that current solutions don’t solve for scalability, security, reliability, and the complexity of real-life applications at scale.

Today, teams only have expensive options: implement AI at scale with SageMaker or Vertex (the AWS and GCP end-to-end offerings), overpay for Databricks or another end-to-end AI platform, overpay even more for a collection of SaaS offerings, or hire expensive engineers to roll your own in-house. What does that last approach actually look like? It's cobbling together a host of open source technologies, ranging from a Llama model to LangChain to Airflow, KServe, OpenCost, and much more.

There is a massive opportunity to make AI easier to adopt. This is where Cake comes in. We invested in Cake because we believe in the AI Revolution and think it should be for everyone. Production-grade AI has for too long been the technology of the few, and Cake AI is making it the technology of the many.

Today, we couldn’t be happier to celebrate Cake’s official launch out of stealth with its $13 million seed round, led by Gradient, and with ongoing participation from Primary following our lead investment in the pre-seed round.

Simply put, the Cake thesis is that open source will be the long-term winner in AI, but it is far too expensive and complex to deploy for the vast majority of companies. Cake gives you the speed of a buy with the customizability of a build via a powerful, composable platform that lowers the barrier to entry for best-in-class open source AI.

The mission and momentum of Cake make it exciting, but the team makes it truly special. We have known Misha Herscu, the Cofounder and CEO of Cake, since 2021, when he joined Primary to help us incubate a new business. We quickly realized that Misha is one of a kind, with a level of determination, persistence, and intellectual curiosity you rarely get the pleasure to witness. Misha’s tenacity and sales rigor, combined with his technical acumen, have gotten the business to where it is today.

Misha is joined by Skyler Thomas, a former Founder and Distinguished Engineer at IBM and HPE. Skyler brings decades of experience with large-scale, enterprise deployments of AI and ML systems, and he and Misha are the perfect complements.

We could not be more excited to back Cake on this next phase in their journey. They’re just getting started – stay tuned!