Anyscale is a company that provides a managed platform built on Ray, the open-source distributed-computing engine for scaling AI and Python applications. It was launched in December 2019 by Ray’s creators Robert Nishihara, Philipp Moritz, and Ion Stoica, together with UC Berkeley professor Michael I. Jordan. Ray itself originated in Berkeley’s RISELab, and Anyscale was formed to commercialize and broaden its adoption.
The company announced its launch with $20.6 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from NEA, Intel Capital, Amplify Partners, and others. Its stated aim, in the words of CEO Robert Nishihara, was to help “developers, enterprises and organizations solve their problems without having to worry about scalable infrastructure and without needing to be experts in distributed computing,” letting applications scale from a laptop to a data center.
Why business readers should care: training and serving large models requires coordinating work across many machines, a hard problem most teams do not want to solve themselves. Anyscale represents the pattern of an open-source infrastructure project (Ray) paired with a managed commercial service, a common shape across the AI developer-tools economy.