Anyscale Inc., a distributed computing startup that’s aiming to simplify multicloud application development, said today it has closed on a $100 million funding round that brings its total amount raised to $160.6 million.

The Series C round was led by Lee Fixel’s Addition and existing investor Andreessen Horowitz, and saw participation from NEA, Intel Capital and Foundation Capital.

Anyscale is the company behind the open-source Python framework Ray, which is used to run distributed computing projects. Ray includes both a universal serverless compute application programming interface and an expanded ecosystem of libraries. They enable developers to build scalable applications that can run on multicloud platforms without needing to worry about the underlying infrastructure.

One of the key advantages of Ray is it eliminates the need for in-house distributed computing expertise.

The Anyscale cloud platform, meanwhile, is a managed version of Ray aimed at making it more accessible. The Ray platform requires a fair amount of expertise that typically only a few high-level developers and computing specialists possess.

What Anyscale is trying to solve is the difficulty of taking an artificial intelligence prototype built on a laptop and scaling that model across hundreds of machines in the cloud.

In a blog post, Anyscale Chief Executive Robert Nishihara (pictured, center, alongside Executive Chairman Ion Stoica and Chief Technology Officer Philipp Moritz) said this transition from AI prototyping to production is where hundreds of developers come unstuck.

“So many teams get bogged down in building infrastructure and solving the tooling and scaling challenges adjacent to doing AI,” he wrote. “Before you know it, doing machine learning means hiring an infrastructure team to build and maintain ad-hoc distributed systems.”

The idea with Anyscale is to create the illusion of an “infinite laptop” that makes it possible to build multicloud apps from a single machine, with a serverless architecture automatically scaling up and down to meet resource demands.

The Anyscale platform is now generally available, the company said, and will help companies of every size scale up HPC and artificial intelligence projects that require intensive computing power.

Nishihara explained that the platform enables developers to accelerate development and experimentation through instant access to cloud scale from a laptop. Users can also easily deploy AI models created on Anyscale into production and manage the end-to-end AI lifecycle without worrying about the infrastructure that underlies it.

“We’re thrilled to announce the general availability of Anyscale’s cloud platform,” Nishihara said. “Our cloud platform will now be available to every developer and organization looking to scale AI. If you use Ray, Anyscale is the best way to run Ray.”

Anyscale said most of the funds it raised today will be used to develop Ray and the Anyscale cloud platform further. It will also use some of the capital to build out its sales and marketing teams.

Photo: Anyscale