Announcing Metal’s $2.5M seed funding

Today we’re happy to announce that we’ve completed our seed fundraising of $2.5M, led by Swift Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator and Chapter One!

While Sergio, James and I have been fortunate enough to build products together for more than half a decade, we’ve never been more excited about our work. So before we dive in, we’d like to extend a massive thank you to our mentors, investors, and most importantly our customers. Without your support, none of this would be possible.

A New Class of Software Emerges

Our industry is going through an unprecedented transformation. AI and large language models (LLMs) have changed how we think about and build software, and by extension, how we will experience technology in our daily lives.

From a developer's perspective, the change starts with data. LLMs represent a new class of software, allowing systems to be built with semantic inputs and outputs. This has unleashed a flood of activity in the developer community, capturing the world’s imagination in the process.

By incorporating language – including its conventions, inherent meanings, and contextual nuances – into software, we can reduce the friction between systems and the people who build them. We can reframe how information flows, is shared, and is presented with digital products and tools.

Think about the last time you needed a question answered at your job; how did you go about it? You likely pinged a colleague over chat, searched through a file storage system, or sifted through your notes to locate the necessary information. With LLMs, you can instead build a system that retrieves what you’re looking for by simply posing a question in natural language. If you extrapolate this across an entire organization – how much time and effort would be saved in a given day? What about a year?

The potential is enormous – but there is still so much work to do before we can realize it. It’s our job at Metal to empower the builders and leaders who will drive this technology forward. Because these are the people who will create durable and intrinsic value, but they need a modern set of tools to do so.

Metal is for Real World Applications

Software is only as valuable as the problems it solves, so Metal is designed for applications intended for real-world use. Because developers want to build applications and solve problems. They don’t want to write out their own infrastructure, indexing pipelines, or model deployments.

Metal removes this complexity. We are a fully managed service that handles data transformation, indexing, and storage so you don’t have to. We provide simple APIs and developer-friendly tools that let you easily query and consume your data. Semantic search and data used to power LLM chatbots are out of the box. And to help developers learn and iterate quickly, we provide observability into your application’s usage and performance.

But we acknowledge that there is still a need for expertise in these early days. This is especially true for the enterprise, as unlocking the potential of LLMs requires more than a simple plug-and-play solution. This is why our team works directly with enterprises to get from idea to production. Business leaders need to validate that this technology works and we are taking this on as part of our mission.

So if you are a developer or an organization that wants to understand how this new set of tools can be put to use, but you aren’t sure what the technology is capable of or how to get started, get in touch with us. We would love to help you build.

What’s Next?

We are focusing our efforts in three areas.

First, we will invest in giving developers the best experience possible. We will continue supporting our open-source work and the developer community. We will continue building Metal alongside every application to ensure we support each newly discovered use case for the AI stack. This means more powerful ways to transform, store, and query your data. It means being able to use all of your data – structured and unstructured.

Second, we are continuing to invest in the enterprise. We will support scaling Metal applications across entire organizations while keeping data protected. This means an on-prem offering, private embedding generation, user management and permissions, and more.

And third, we will build out our team to meet the increasing demand of our customers! We’re based in Brooklyn NY, and if you’re interested in working with us please get in touch: careers@getmetal.io

🤘 Taylor + James + Sergio