Anyscale, a US-based distributed computing framework developer, emerged from stealth on Tuesday with $20.6m in a series A round featuring Intel Capital, the corporate venturing subsidiary of semiconductor technology manufacturer Intel.
Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz led the round, which included Ant Financial, the financial services affiliate of e-commerce group Alibaba, as well as 11.2 Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Amplify Partners and the University of California (UC), Berkeley-focused House Fund.
Anyscale is working on a platform called Ray that can be used to develop software applications that run from multiple computers simultaneously.
The company’s co-founders, which include Michael Jordan, distinguished professor in UC Berkeley’s electrical engineering and computer sciences department, had previously invented distributed computing tool Project Ray.
Robert Nishihara, Anyscale’s co-founder and CEO, said: “As the adoption of Ray has grown, we have seen it become the open source project of choice for scaling complex distributed applications from a laptop to a data centre. As distributed computing continues to grow, the natural next step is to bring Ray to more organisations that can benefit from its capabilities.
“Our mission is to help more developers, enterprises and organisations solve their problems without having to worry about scalable infrastructure and without needing to be experts in distributed computing. With this investment, we will fortify our ability to continuously improve Ray and grow our team to make this mission a reality.”
The original version of this article appeared on our sister site, Global University Venturing.