Artificial intelligence observability and evaluation platform Arize AI Inc. today announced it’s acquiring Velvet, an AI gateway for developers to analyze and monitor AI features in production.

Founded in 2020, Arize AI offers tools that assist with detecting AI issues with large language model AI in production, tracing root causes and enhancing overall performance. It’s essentially a system that helps humans tell what AI is doing, tell when it’s breaking, how it’s breaking and how to fix it when it’s broken. Divining all this can become extremely problematic because AI systems are extremely complex with many moving parts that can be hard to see.

Velvet started in 2023 from a more developer-centric perspective as an observability platform for AI aimed at assisting engineers working with logs produced by models from Anthropic PBC and OpenAI.

The big takeaway for the company is that it allows developers to get set up and running with model comparison, analysis and evaluation in under five minutes. The company now provides an AI gateway to capture traces, an AI SQL editor for analytics and evaluation tooling for experiments and monitoring.

In an interview with SiliconANGLE, Chief Executive Jason Lopatecki said the big picture was that there has been an increase in demand in the AI industry for monitoring and evaluation. That has led to an increased need for talent and as a result, Arize is bringing Velvet’s team on board to grow its capabilities.

“There absolutely is an AI arms race out there where every team is in a period of grow your leadership in the vertical you’re in,” Lopatecki said. “I think part of this is putting together a team who knows the space we’re building in and can immediately add to that, and whose tech they’ve built is immediately additive. It’s about the hard-to-get talent in AI and joining forces and focusing in areas to grow from.”

Chris Hendel, Velvet’s co-founder and chief technology officer, will lead platform engineering initiatives at Arize. These include guiding and focusing on developer experience initiatives and accelerating the adoption of the company’s enterprise Arize AX model evaluation and observability platform, its open-source AI observability platform Phoenix OSS and the company’s Arize AI Copilot.

The companies did not disclose the terms of the deal.

Emma Lawler, founder and former CEO of Velvet, told SiliconANGLE that she was impressed by Arize’s team’s deep background in the business and how quickly they handled each new phase of AI.

“The AI industry is rapidly changing daily, so it’s difficult for teams and developers to keep up — especially when their job is to build a product rather than specialize in AI infrastructure,” said Lawler. “Teams are leveraging the best model for each feature, rather than a single provider. This introduces the need for a unified place to trace, evaluate, and monitor systems in production.”

She added that a platform that can adhere closely to a native data model, such as Arize, rather than adding extra abstraction layers, would be able to adapt and overcome more effectively with industry evolutions.

“Eventually the industry will align on ‘the right’ way to do things, but we’re still in the early installation phase of this technology,” Lawler said.

Image: SiliconANGLE/Microsoft Designer