By Anirban Ghoshal
Cloud-based data warehouse company Snowflake is acquiring assets in the form of an observability platform from Redwood-based TruEra — a startup that specializes in providing lifecycle management capabilities for machine learning and large language models (LLMs) — for an undisclosed sum.
“Snowflake is acquiring the TruEra AI Observability Platform, which provides leading capabilities to evaluate and monitor LLM apps and machine learning models in production,” the company said in a statement.
TruEra’s AI Observability Platform is a managed offering that can be deployed as software-as-a-service (SaaS) or hybrid SaaS via virtual private cloud, and public cloud.
TruEra also offers a self-service offering, dubbed TruLens, which is not likely to be part of the Snowflake deal.
Some of the key offerings of the platform include model explainability, model quality analytics, review and governance workflows for models, model comparisons and selection, and continuous monitoring for reporting incidents.
These offerings, according to Snowflake, help evaluate the quality of inputs, outputs, and intermediate results of LLM-based applications, including hallucination, bias, or toxicity.
“This expedites experiment evaluation for a wide variety of use cases, including question answering, summarization, retrieval-augmented generation-based applications (RAG apps), and agent-based applications,” the company explained.
Additionally, the platform also has capabilities to provide detailed, actionable insights to improve machine learning model performance and accuracy by revealing anomalies in model metrics and providing a specific root cause analysis for rapid debugging.
While Snowflake claims that the acquisition of the Observability Platform will add to the existing AI governance functionalities inside its AI Data Cloud offering, the move could be seen as Snowflake’s effort to align its capabilities with the likes of AWS’ Amazon Bedrock, Google’s Vertex AI, and Microsoft’s Azure AI service — all of which offer LLM evaluation, lifecycle management, and monitoring capabilities.
Snowflake started shifting its focus towards generative AI last year with the company showcasing Snowpark Container Services in June, followed by the preview of Cortex in November.
Snowpark Container Services, which was intended to allow enterprises to bring more diverse workloads, including LLMs, to the Data Cloud Platform, acts as a linchpin, connecting enterprise data stored in Snowflake with LLMs, model training interfaces, model governance frameworks, third-party data augmenting applications, machine learning models, APIs, and Snowflake’s Native Application Framework.
On the other hand, Cortex is a fully managed (serverless) service inside the Data Cloud that provides enterprises with the building blocks to use LLMs and AI without requiring any expertise in managing complex GPU-based infrastructure.
Earlier this year, Snowflake previewed its open-source large language model (LLM), Arctic, to take on the likes of Meta’s Llama 3, Mistral’s family of models, xAI’s Grok-1, and Databricks’ DBRX. Arctic, which can be accessed via Cortex, is aimed at enterprise tasks such as SQL generation, code generation, and instruction following.
The transaction with TruEra will see at least 37 staffers from the company join Snowflake, including its three co-founders — president and chief scientist Anupam Datta, chief technology officer Shayak Sen, and CEO Will Uppington.
TruEra, which has raised approximately $43 million till data and is backed by Menlo Ventures, Greylock Partners, Wing Venture Captial, Harpoon Ventures, HPE, and Conversion Captial among others, started its operations basis six years of research done by Datta and Sen during their tenure at Carnegie Mellon University. The company has four offices across India, Singapore, the UK and the US.
Separately, Snowflake was trying to acquire Reka AI to bring in more LLMs into its services and offerings. However, earlier this week, the deal fell through, according to Bloomberg. Snowflake had offered approximately $1 billion to purchase Reka AI. The venture arm of the data warehousing software provider is also an investor in the LLM-providing startup, which was founded by researchers from Meta and Google.
