For the past couple of years, Streamlit, a startup founded by machine learning veterans, has been working on an open source project to help data scientists build web apps to explore the data in machine learning models. Today the company announced the project has reached version 1.0.
“Two years ago we came out [with the initial version of Streamlit]. So we’re putting a stamp on it and saying this is ready to go. We are super, super proud of it, and in fact, there’s a great roadmap ahead of other things that we’re building for the community as our reach grows,” CEO and co-founder Adrien Treuille told TechCrunch.
He said that when they started they had a sense based on their own experience that there was a need for a tool that let data scientists take the data they were working on and share it with the rest of the organization, and over that time as thousands of people have downloaded the product, they have found that idea validated.
“The open source product is freely available and all the source code can be seen. It’s backed by a huge community of people who are finding bugs, making suggestions and even contributing to the code,” he said.
Streamlit nabs $35M Series B to expand machine learning platform
Amanda Kelly, who is co-founder and COO at the company, says they have gone from an early user base of a handful of customers to a huge community of users, partly driven by the popularity of Python.
“I think you know the core thing is that if you understand Python, which tens of millions of people do now, even just a little bit of Python, you really can get started with Streamlit, so anybody who’s like looking to go from some type of data, some type of APIs where they’re all coming together, you can use Streamlit to really quickly get an answer,” she said.
The company reports that over half of the Fortune 50 is using the open source product, and a data scientist from Facebook, Tyler Richards, completely independent of the company, wrote a book on how to use Streamlit.
The company, which scored a $35 million Series B in April, has also been working on a commercial cloud service in addition to the open source project, which should be ready before the end of the year. The commercial product is currently in private beta at over 700 companies, which means they should hit the ground running when it is eventually available.
The company launched in 2018 and has raised $62 million, according to Crunchbase data.
Comment