After spending more than a decade in the AI industry, I saw the same story play out at company after company. Brilliant teams with incredible ideas were consistently held back by the same tedious, foundational work. They were forced to reinvent the wheel on every project, spending the majority of their time on integrations and security instead of the core AI challenges they were hired to solve. This shared frustration is what led us to create Cake AI. We built the platform we wish we’d had all along—one that manages the entire stack so engineers can stop worrying about the plumbing and start building the future.
Today’s funding milestone represents more than just a financial achievement—it embodies a vision born out of personal loss, professional frustration, and a commitment to making advanced AI accessible to everyone.
In 2013, I left IBM to dedicate my career to AI in healthcare after a tragedy that forever shaped my life. My sister died too young from a heart attack during pregnancy—a devastating event that would have been preventable with better, earlier alerting. Since I was constantly exposed to the AI research papers published daily on Arxiv, I couldn’t help but wonder: What if cutting-edge AI could have flagged the risks sooner?
At my first startup, I spent most of my time on various integrations and security fixes, just like almost every other AI professional I know. Everyone has to spend time on the boring infrastructure work rather than solving the real problem.
Who we are: The team behind Cake AI
That shared frustration—knowing that powerful AI could solve critical problems but was held back by tedious infrastructure work—is what brought our team together. We saw brilliant people spending their time reinventing the wheel on every project instead of focusing on innovation. We knew there had to be a better way to build, and that conviction became the foundation of Cake. This common experience, where the promise of AI gets bogged down by the practicalities of implementation, inspired us to create a solution that lets developers focus on what truly matters: creating impactful applications that can change industries and even save lives.
Founded in 2022 with a clear mission
We started Cake with a straightforward goal: to make advanced, production-grade AI accessible to everyone, not just a select few. We believe that the best open-source AI tools shouldn't be locked behind complex and expensive infrastructure hurdles. Our mission is to provide a powerful and flexible platform that makes it easier and more affordable for companies of all sizes to build with cutting-edge technology. As our early supporters at Primary VC put it, we aim to democratize production-grade AI by handling the difficult parts of the stack. This empowers teams to focus on what they do best—solving real-world problems with intelligent applications.
Led by experienced co-founders
Our co-founders knew from experience that the biggest challenge for many AI teams isn't the individual tools they use, but how those tools connect and work together. The endless cycle of integration, security patching, and maintenance drains resources and slows down progress. To solve this, we built a special, modular platform that helps teams create and grow AI products more efficiently. Cake provides a unified system that manages the entire stack, from compute infrastructure to security, so your team can build faster and with more confidence. It’s about giving developers a solid, secure foundation so they can stop worrying about the plumbing and start building the future.
Open source — whether for fine-tuning and serving models, preparing datasets, or monitoring and evaluating your applications and workflows — is essential. I worked on over one hundred enterprise AI implementations during my years as a Distinguished Engineer at MapR and HPE, and what I saw as a near universal experience is that every company, no matter how big or small, has been stuck doing the same foundational work over and over:
Securing the insanely cool tools built in research labs
Integrating them into their unique environments and with the insanely cool things that came out last year
Monitoring performance, setting up alerting for issues, and troubleshooting and debugging various errors
It was frustrating to see so much duplicated effort and inefficiency, especially as the pace of open-source innovation accelerated with the advent of Generative AI. Every year, new tools emerged, but integrating them with older components remained a massive, expensive challenge. The long tail of AI—where every customer has unique needs—meant there was no one-size-fits-all solution. Vendors have been trying to sell the “democratizing AI” line for years with minor progress. This long tail or “last mile” has been the principal problem blocking democratization. When you have an ambitious AI roadmap, you really need something that looks a lot like a custom build. But, infrastructure vendors keep trying to make cookie-cutter solutions fit into places that they are unsuited to.
Over the years, it became painfully clear to me that AI innovation is slowest to reach the people and industries that need it most. Smaller organizations, especially those in industries like healthcare, simply don’t have the resources to hire teams of engineers or build custom platforms. This means they often wait years to benefit from frontier AI innovations. Those delays cost lives, opportunities, and progress.
That’s why I co-founded Cake AI: to bridge the gap between cutting-edge AI and the industries that stand to gain the most from it.
Solving the "platform glue" problem
The biggest challenge for many AI teams isn't a lack of powerful tools; it's the endless, frustrating work of making them all connect and function together. This is the "platform glue" problem. Every organization has been forced to spend valuable time and resources securing, integrating, and monitoring a complex web of open-source components. At Cake, we decided to solve this by building the glue ourselves. Our unified platform manages the entire stack—from compute infrastructure to common integrations—so your team doesn’t have to. We handle the foundational work that gets duplicated across the industry, freeing your engineers to focus on building innovative AI applications that address your unique business needs, not on troubleshooting infrastructure.
Making production-grade open-source AI accessible
By eliminating the integration headache, we make advanced AI achievable for the organizations that are often last to benefit from it. For too long, the high cost and complexity of building a custom AI stack have kept cutting-edge tools out of reach for many, especially in critical sectors like healthcare. We believe that access to powerful AI shouldn't depend on the size of your engineering budget. Cake bridges this gap by providing a production-ready foundation that makes open-source AI not just powerful, but also practical and accessible. This approach helps more companies use production-grade AI to solve real-world problems, ensuring progress isn't limited to a select few.
Cake AI is the platform I wish had existed when I started out in this industry 15+ years ago. It’s a unified, enterprise-ready architecture built from over 100 open-source components. Cake doesn’t just integrate the latest AI innovations; it does so in a way that’s secure, scalable, and ready for real-world use.
Here’s what makes Cake transformative:
1. Speeds Up AI Adoption: Cake integrates the newest AI tools with the best of what’s already available, ensuring that customers can harness cutting-edge innovations without starting from scratch.
2. Enterprise-Ready: Cake secures every open-source component, fixes critical CVEs, and updates the entire platform quarterly. It also provides 24/7 SLA support, so customers never have to worry about downtime.
3. Built for Regulated Industries: Cake runs in a customer’s own VPC across multiple clouds, making it compliant with the strict requirements of healthcare, financial services, pharma, and other highly regulated sectors.
4. Comprehensive Coverage: Cake supports almost every AI and ML niche, including but not limited to:
Training and inference
Monitoring and evaluation
Data engineering and data cleaning
LLMs, embeddings, pipelines, and RAG
5. Tailored for Unique Needs: Every business has distinct challenges, and Cake’s modular architecture ensures that they can meet those challenges without building from scratch. Cake’s architecture also makes it easy for us to grab the latest idea out of the research lab.
6. Future-proof: Almost every customer I meet tells me they are worried about investing in specific AI technologies because the field is moving so quickly. It’s hard to predict winners even 2-3 months out, let alone 1-2 years. That’s a big part of the Cake value prop. Cake curates components but doesn’t play favorites. We try to find a few of the best open source packages in each area of the AI life-cycle to mitigate risk. This means customers aren’t locked into making any specific bet. While Cake can save them a lot of money over expensive SaaS solutions, Cake also makes it easy to keep using whatever external components they decide make sense for your use cases.
Real results you can measure
Talk is one thing, but results are what truly matter. We built Cake to solve real-world problems, and the impact on our customers is clear and quantifiable. By handling the complex, repetitive infrastructure work, we free up teams to focus on what they do best: innovate. This shift doesn't just feel better; it produces tangible outcomes that you can see in your timelines, budgets, and team productivity. We're not just offering a platform; we're offering a new way to approach AI development that delivers measurable success and a significant return on investment. These are the kinds of results our partners see when they build on Cake.
Deploy AI applications up to 4x faster
One of the biggest hurdles in AI is the time it takes to get from a great idea to a production-ready application. We've seen it time and again: teams get bogged down in security, integrations, and troubleshooting. Cake helps you launch AI applications four times faster by providing a secure, integrated, and stable foundation from day one. For complex projects, like those involving Generative AI, we can help you get ready for production in as little as 48 hours. This acceleration means your business can react to market changes faster and start seeing the value from your AI initiatives in weeks, not months or years.
Save over $1 million on large language model projects
Large language model (LLM) projects can be incredibly powerful, but they can also be incredibly expensive, with costs spiraling out of control. Cake is designed to prevent that. By optimizing infrastructure and providing clear cost controls, we help companies save between $500,000 and over $1,000,000 each year on their LLM projects. These savings come from eliminating redundant engineering work, avoiding expensive proprietary software licenses, and ensuring that your compute resources are used efficiently. It’s about making frontier AI economically viable for your business, so you can innovate without breaking the bank.
Increase MLOps team productivity by 6x
Your MLOps team is one of your most valuable assets, but they often spend too much time on low-level maintenance and integration tasks. Our platform automates and streamlines these essential but time-consuming operations. As a result, teams using Cake have seen their MLOps productivity improve by six times or more. This means your best engineers can stop wrestling with infrastructure and start focusing on building models, refining algorithms, and driving the core AI work that creates a competitive advantage for your company. It’s about empowering your talent to do their most impactful work.
Key features of our enterprise AI platform
The results our customers achieve are a direct outcome of the way our platform is designed. We didn't just bundle a bunch of open-source tools together; we thoughtfully engineered a cohesive system that addresses the most significant challenges enterprises face when operationalizing AI. From governance and cost management to security and flexibility, every feature is built to make your AI journey smoother, safer, and more successful. The Cake AI platform provides the essential capabilities you need to build and scale with confidence, knowing the foundational pieces are solid.
Active governance and cost control
AI projects can quickly become expensive and complex, making governance a top priority. Cake gives you active control by enforcing rules and limits right where your AI runs. This isn't just about tracking expenses after the fact; it's about proactive management. Our platform provides clear, transparent ways to see and manage costs before they become a problem. This active governance ensures your AI initiatives stay aligned with your budget and business objectives, giving you the predictability you need to scale responsibly and confidently.
Multi-cloud and on-premise flexibility
Your data and infrastructure strategy is unique to your business, and your AI platform should adapt to you, not the other way around. Cake is built for flexibility, working seamlessly across different cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure, as well as on your own on-premise servers. This multi-cloud approach means you're never locked into a single vendor. You have the freedom to choose the best environment for each workload, optimize for cost and performance, and maintain control over your technology stack, ensuring your AI strategy remains agile and future-proof.
Support for critical business use cases
AI is not a one-size-fits-all technology. That's why Cake is designed to support a wide variety of critical business use cases right out of the box. Whether you're creating intelligent chatbots, automating document processing, performing complex data analysis, or extracting key information with RAG, our platform provides the necessary components. We manage all the underlying parts of your AI project, from security configurations to budget tracking, so you can focus on applying AI to solve your most pressing business challenges and create new opportunities for growth.
Built for compliance and security
For businesses in regulated industries, security and compliance are non-negotiable. We understand this, which is why security is not an afterthought in Cake—it's built into the platform's DNA from the very beginning. By integrating security and compliance measures at every layer, we make it easier for your organization to meet stringent standards like SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR. You can innovate with cutting-edge AI while being confident that your applications are running in a secure, compliant environment that protects your data and your customers' trust.
Why now?
AI is advancing at an unprecedented pace, but the gap between innovation and adoption is growing wider. Small- and mid-sized organizations, in particular, are left behind because they lack the resources to implement the latest tools.
At Cake, we’re solving that problem. By streamlining integration and securing components, we empower businesses to focus on what they do best—whether that’s saving lives, creating products, or driving economic growth.
Additionally, a modern engineering team, powered by GenAI coding co-pilots and our internal frameworks, can develop and maintain a far richer modular stack than would have been economically feasible even 12 months ago.
What's next for Cake AI?
When I reflect on the journey that led to Cake, I see a clear throughline: a desire to make AI practical, impactful, and accessible for everyone. Today’s announcement is just the beginning. With the support of Gradient Ventures, Primary Venture Partners, our incredible team, my rockstar co-founder Misha (read his blog here), we’re excited to help industry adopt frontier AI at a speed and scale that was previously unimaginable.
Thank you for believing in our vision, and here’s to making AI work for everyone.
Introducing Cake.me: AI tools for your career
Our mission to make AI work for everyone extends beyond enterprise solutions. We believe in applying this powerful technology to solve real-world challenges that people face every day, like finding a fulfilling career. That’s why we developed Cake.me, a platform designed to make the job search and hiring process smarter, faster, and more effective for everyone involved.
For job seekers
Landing the right job can be a tough, time-consuming process. Cake.me gives you an edge by putting AI to work on your behalf. Our AI Resume Health Check analyzes your resume’s content, style, and structure, offering concrete tips to make sure you stand out. When it’s time to apply, the AI Cover Letter Generator creates personalized letters tailored to each specific role, using information from your resume to highlight your most relevant skills. To top it off, our AI Job Recommendations tool actively suggests open roles that are a great match for your experience and interests, so you can spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right opportunities.
For employers
Finding the perfect candidate in a sea of applicants is one of the biggest challenges in hiring. Cake.me streamlines this process, creating a more efficient talent acquisition platform. You can use the AI Job Description Generator to instantly create clear, professional, and comprehensive job postings based on your company’s needs for a specific role. Once the applications start coming in, our AI Talent Search engine uses smart technology to quickly identify the job seekers who are the best fit for your open positions. This allows your team to focus on interviewing high-quality candidates instead of sifting through endless resumes.
Frequently asked questions
What exactly is Cake AI in a nutshell? Think of Cake as the complete, expert-built foundation for your company's AI applications. Instead of your engineers spending months connecting, securing, and maintaining dozens of different open-source tools, we provide a single, unified platform where all that foundational work is already done. This lets your team focus their time and talent on building the actual AI products that solve your business problems.
How is Cake different from just using open-source tools on my own? Using open-source tools yourself is like being handed a pile of high-quality car parts. You still have to figure out how to assemble them, make sure they work together securely, and fix them when they break. Cake is the fully assembled, road-tested car. We handle the complex integration, security patching, and ongoing maintenance of over 100 open-source components so you can skip the tedious assembly and start driving your AI initiatives forward immediately.
My team is worried about betting on the wrong AI technology. How does Cake help with that? That's a very real concern, and it's a core problem we solve. Our platform is modular by design, meaning you aren't locked into any single tool or framework. We curate and integrate several of the best open-source options for each part of the AI lifecycle. This gives you the flexibility to use the best technology for the job today and easily swap in new, better components tomorrow without having to rebuild your entire system from scratch.
Is Cake designed for a specific type of company or industry? While companies of all sizes can benefit from accelerating their AI development, Cake is especially powerful for organizations in highly regulated industries like healthcare, finance, and pharma. We build security and compliance into every layer of the platform from the start. Because Cake can run in your own private cloud environment, it helps you meet strict data privacy and governance requirements that are often non-negotiable.
How does Cake actually save us money on AI projects? The savings come from several places. First, you reduce the immense engineering hours your team would otherwise spend building and maintaining a custom AI platform. Second, our platform includes active governance and cost controls to prevent unexpected and expensive cloud bills. Finally, by helping you deploy AI applications up to four times faster, you start seeing a return on your investment much sooner.
Key Takeaways
- Stop reinventing the wheel on infrastructure: Cake was born from the common frustration of brilliant AI teams getting stuck on tedious foundational work. The platform handles the entire stack—integrations, security, and monitoring—so your team can focus on solving core business problems, not rebuilding infrastructure.
- Make open-source AI enterprise-ready: Cake acts as the essential "platform glue," integrating and securing the best open-source tools into a single, cohesive system. This makes advanced AI accessible and compliant for any organization, especially those in highly regulated sectors.
- Accelerate your AI roadmap with clear ROI: Building on Cake delivers tangible results. You can deploy applications up to 4x faster, save over $1 million on LLM projects, and increase MLOps team productivity by 6x, turning your AI initiatives into measurable business value.
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