Hopsworks brews up €5.9M funding round to fuel US market penetration

Stockholm-based software company Hopsworks has raised $6.5 million (€5.9 million) in a funding round led by Vendep, with participation from Inventure and Industrifonden. This capital injection will enable Hopsworks to expand its operations, focusing on penetrating the US market.

Lars Nordwall, former president of Neo4j, is now the executive chair of the board at Hopsworks, aiding in accelerating the go-to-market strategy.

Nordwall highlighted the company’s sophisticated machine learning platform and proficient engineering team headquartered in Stockholm. He also noted the early interest exhibited by enterprise customers, which provides a testament to the product’s maturity and the existing customer need.

“I am excited about the growth opportunity and ability to make an impact on such an excellent company,” he said.

Vendep general partner Sami Ahvenniemi explained that despite AI adoption being a continuous process in enterprises, the current situation is critical due to uncoordinated usage causing issues like “overlapping work, slowness and other inefficiencies”.

According to him, Hopsworks steps in not only to ensure businesses can “reap AI & ML benefits” but also to cut down the time needed for development and the costs linked with ML endeavours.

“We are proud to join Hopsworks and help them further build on their lead in the feature store market,” he said.

Enables feature engineering

Hopsworks is a flexible enterprise MLOps platform that includes a feature store. It supports independent feature pipelines, training pipelines and inference pipelines, improving collaboration between data and ML teams and enhancing ML systems’ operation and maintainability.

The startup also enables feature engineering at scale and allows users to bring their code and use popular libraries and frameworks.

Hopsworks provides projects as a secure sandbox in which teams can collaborate and share ML assets. It uses a distinctive multi-tenant project model that allows for role-based access control, project-based multi-tenancy and customized metadata to ensure governance.

Notable clients, such as American-First Credit Union, PaddyPower-Betfair and the Swedish Public Employment Service, have benefited from Hopsworks’ advancements in the ML process.