A group of former Meta engineers is building a platform to help companies deploy machine learning models at the speed of large tech companies. their start, TrueFoundryhas raised $2.3 million in a funding round.

The startup, headquartered in San Francisco, California, automates repetitive tasks in the machine learning pipeline so data scientists and engineers can focus on more valuable, creative tasks. Built on Kubernetes, the custom platform works as a cloud agnostic solution that can be deployed on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

TrueFoundry says it helps machine learning teams achieve 10x faster results and shortens their production timelines from “a few weeks to a few hours.” This is especially useful for companies that don’t have large machine learning teams.

Unlike the traditional way that takes a long time, TrueFoundry says machine learning developers using their platform can get their models into production as hosted endpoints in less than five minutes, along with autoscaling and track the results from scratch .

Nikunj Bajaj, co-founder and CEO of TrueFoundry, said in an interview with australiabusinessblog.com that some key lessons from Meta have helped the startup solve machine learning implementation issues. Bajaj worked as an ML Tech Lead at Meta and San Mateo-based software development company Reflektion after receiving his master’s degree in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley.

He founded TrueFoundry in June 2021, along with his IIT Kharagpur batchmates Anuraag Gutgutia and Abhishek Choudhary. Choudhary, who serves as CTO at TrueFoundry, also worked at Meta as a software engineer and helped the social networking giant develop products including mobile apps and live video.

TrueFoundry considers Amazon, Google and Microsoft Azure to be some of its main competitors, as they also have their own machine learning platforms. However, Gutgutia believes that the big cloud players are not very developer-friendly.

“Our goal from day zero has been to provide a superior developer experience. The curve of learning to get started with our system is no more than an hour,” he said.

TrueFoundry serves clients with small teams of data scientists and is active in areas such as fintech, e-commerce, financial services, healthcare and retail.

Before venturing into TrueFoundry, Bajaj, Choudhary, and Gutgutia co-founded an AI-based recruiting platform EntHire, which was acquired by Info Edge last year.

TrueFoundry, whose current workforce is 16 and based primarily in India, said Tuesday it has raised $2.3 million in a round led by Sequoia India’s Surge. Others who took part in the funding were Eniac Ventures and angels such as AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant, Deutsche Bank Global CIO Dilip Khandelwal, GitHub India head Maneesh Sharma, Greenhouse Software CTO Mike Boufford and Kaggle founder Anthony Goldbloom.

The startup, which plans to use the new funds to broaden its platform and hire more individuals, recently opened early access to its platform and is partnering with companies as early customers for the beta. It is set to make a public launch in the next month or two, Gutgutia said.

It is also looking for onboard advisors who can help promote the platform and increase its reach.