DEVOPSdigest

Mage raised a $6.3 million seed round led by Gradient Ventures, Google's AI-focused venture fund, with additional participation from firms such as Neo and Designer Fund and angel investors like Unity CEO John Riccitiello, Behance founder Scott Belsky, Lenny's Newsletter author Lenny Rachitsky and James Beshara.

Mage is a low-code tool that is built for product developers, making it easy for product teams to build, train, and integrate AI into their apps, even if they've never worked with AI in the past.

Co-founders Tommy Dang and Xiaoyou Wang worked at Airbnb together where they built an internal low-code tool and collaborated with many product developers across teams. They determined that product developers know what AI is, what it can do, and how it can improve a users' experience but didn't have access to the right tools to implement their ideas.

"There are many tools available for building AI models and large companies internally create their own, but those tools are built for data scientists, AI researchers, or ML engineers. It's time for product developers to leverage the power of AI within their team or broader organization. Many developers at smaller companies have an urgency to use AI but lack the resources and tools. Just like Stripe made it easy for any developer to integrate payments into their apps, Mage makes it easy for any developer to build and integrate AI into their apps," said Tommy Dang, Co-Founder and CEO of Mage.

Mage's simple, collaborative, and intuitive design allows product developers to import and transform data from anywhere; train, enhance, and deploy models in minutes, instead of months, without relying on data scientists. While Mage's tool can serve many use-cases, the team is currently focused on optimizing customer product engagement and revenue growth. Current customers are already leveraging Mage's platform to boost customer retention, reduce app usage churn, or optimize upsell opportunities.

"When we met the founders of Mage, it was clear their experience developing the internal AI platform for Airbnb's product team would be broadly applicable to all companies. These tools are tough to build, but the team's experience serving one of the most demanding product teams in Silicon Valley will prove to be a strong competitive advantage for Mage's current and future products." said Darian Shirazi, General Partner at Gradient Ventures.

Still in beta with plans to launch in early 2022, Mage is focused on serving small to medium-sized companies. The startup is actively hiring for a variety of roles in product design and engineering and plans to use the new capital to build easy-to-use AI tools that enable product teams to train a new model or leverage an existing one without AI experience.