AI company Abacus.AI, formerly known as RealityEngines.AI, announced a $22 million Series B funding round in July, just months after securing $13 million in Series A funding. This latest investment was spearheaded by Coatue, with contributions from Decibel Ventures and Index Partners, bringing the company’s total funding to $40.3 million. Abacus.AI was initially founded by former executives from AWS and Google, including Bindu Reddy.

Alongside the new financial backing, Abacus.AI is introducing a new offering called Abacus.AI Deconstructed. The company’s original vision, as RealityEngines/Abacus.AI, centered on simplifying the creation of AI models through automated training and optimization. However, the company discovered that many prospective clients had already established their own systems for developing and training deep learning models, but required assistance with deployment and ongoing management.

Reddy explained, “A significant challenge for businesses was that they possessed data scientists and internally developed models. Their data scientists could build these models on personal computers, but they lacked the means to deploy them into a production environment and ensure their continued operation.” She further noted that nearly every startup is currently addressing this very issue.

Having already developed the necessary tools, Abacus.AI has decided to offer its services in a modular format, allowing users to integrate specific components without committing to the complete platform. This includes the option to utilize the service for hosting and monitoring existing models. The service will handle model management in production, including detection of model drift.

Furthermore, Abacus.AI is also providing access to its established expertise in model explainability and de-biasing, alongside its real-time machine learning feature store, which facilitates the creation, storage, sharing, and deployment of machine learning features.

According to Reddy, the company wasn’t actively seeking additional funding at this time. Following the announcement of their initial round earlier in the year, they received considerable investment interest. “We determined that raising a subsequent round was advantageous, given the growing adoption rate and our product readiness. However, we recognized the need to expand our sales team, and securing funding early allowed us to do so,” she stated.

Reddy also emphasized that Abacus.AI aims to deliver a comprehensive, self-service solution, differentiating itself from competitors and challenging the offerings of major cloud providers. Building such a solution, and acquiring the necessary engineering talent, requires substantial investment.

Consequently, Abacus.AI intends to allocate the new funding towards expanding its research and development team, as well as growing its go-to-market team from two to ten members in the coming months. While the company is focused on a self-service model and is experiencing success with small and medium-sized businesses, a dedicated sales team remains crucial for engaging with larger enterprises.

The company also anticipates launching support for additional languages and machine vision applications in January.

Yanda Erlich, a partner at Coatue Ventures, shared, “We are pleased to lead the Series B investment in Abacus.AI, as we believe their innovative cloud service makes advanced AI technology accessible to organizations of all sizes, including startups.” Erlich continued, “Abacus.AI’s complete, autonomous AI service, powered by their Neural Architecture Search technology, empowers organizations without specialized ML expertise to easily deploy deep learning systems in production.”