"A lot of people in academia are not very good at software engineering," says Kenny Daniel, co-founder and chief technology officer of cloud computing startup Algorithmia[1]. "I always had more of the software engineering bent."
That, in a nutshell, is some of what makes six-year-old, Seattle-based Algorithmia uniquely focused in a world over-run with machine learning offerings.
Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM, Salesforce, and other large companies have for some time been offering cut-and-paste machine learning in their cloud services. Why would you want to stray to a small, young company?
No reason, unless that startup had a particular knack for hands-on support of machine learning.
That's the premise of Daniel's firm, founded with Diego Oppenheimer, a graduate of Carnegie Mellon and a veteran of Microsoft. The two became best friends in undergrad at CMU, and when Oppenheimer went to industry, Daniel went to pursue a PhD in machine learning at USC. While researching ML, Daniel realized he wanted to build things more than he wanted to just theorize.
"I had the idea for Algorithmia in grad school," Daniel recalled in an interview with ZDNet. "I saw the struggle of getting the work out into the real world; my colleagues and I were developing state-of-the-art [machine learning] models, but not really getting them adopted in the real world the way we wanted."
He dropped out of USC and hooked up with Oppenheimer to found the company. Oppenheimer had seen from the industry side that even for large companies such as Microsoft, there was a struggle to get enough talent to get things deployed and in production.
The duo initially set out to create an App Store for machine learning, a marketplace in which people could buy and sell ML