Voltron Data Acquires Claypot

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 24, 2024 – Voltron Data, the company accelerating modular and composable data analytics systems, today announced that it has acquired Claypot AI, a real-time AI platform startup. Voltron Data processes large batch workloads on GPUs today and will be incorporating Claypot AI’s real-time capabilities on GPU.

Organizations at the forefront of AI are constrained by data preprocessing on CPUs - ETL, feature engineering and transformation are key parts of AI/ML. They cannot ramp up AI capabilities efficiently because they cannot afford to build out big data CPU clusters fast enough. As a result, GPUs that are used for AI/ML workloads are on standby waiting for the preprocessed data from CPU clusters.

To help organizations with this, last month, Voltron Data launched Theseus, the first accelerator-native distributed query engine. Theseus is built from the ground up to help companies take advantage of GPUs and full system hardware accelerators such as high bandwidth memory, accelerated networking and storage. Theseus enables both data preprocessing and AI/ML workloads on GPUs which unifies data analytics and AI pipelines on the same infrastructure, while lowering vendor lock-in risk, energy consumption, and carbon footprint. Theseus is available to enterprises and government agencies with the largest datasets as well as through partners - HPE is the first partner to embed Theseus as its accelerated data processing engine as part of HPE Ezmeral Unified Analytics Software.

By acquiring Claypot AI, Voltron Data can enable real-time analytics, feature engineering and MLOps capabilities powered by Theseus as well as open source products Apache Arrow, Ibis and Substrait.

“I couldn’t be more excited to bring on Chip Huyen, Zhenzhong Xu and the entire Claypot AI team. Together we’re going to be able to accelerate our real-time and MLOps product roadmap with state-of-the-art features for our customers.” said Josh Patterson,Co-founder and CEO of Voltron Data.

Claypot AI was founded in 2022 by Chip Huyen, a computer scientist who wrote the popular Designing Machine Learning Systems book, and Zhenzhong Xu, who led the streaming data platform team that serves more than 2,000 data use cases at Netflix. The team possesses a unique combination of expertise in AI and data systems.

“AI strategies have to start from data strategies. I am thrilled about this new chapter with Voltron Data and the incredible opportunities it presents. We are going to continue to push the boundaries of what's possible in real-time, feature engineering and MLOps for enterprises.” said Chip Huyen, Co-founder and CEO of Claypot AI.