MLOps and AI Observability Startups Raise $112M
Venture capital continues to flow into the MLOps sector, with two significant funding rounds announced. AI observability platform Selector raised $32 million to help enterprises reduce downtime. Meanwhile, Braintrust, which focuses on production AI infrastructure and real-time observability, closed an $80 million Series B funding round.
- Selector's funding round was led by AVP and doubled the company's valuation to $375 million, with cumulative annual recurring revenue (ARR) having doubled for four consecutive years. - Braintrust's Series B was led by ICONIQ, an investor in enterprise leaders like Snowflake and Datadog, and brings the startup's valuation to $800 million. - Selector was founded by former Juniper Networks executives Kannan Kothandaraman and Nitin Kumar to provide network-aware AIOps for multi-cloud environments. - Braintrust CEO Ankur Goyal previously founded Impira (acquired by Figma) and built Braintrust to solve the AI evaluation and observability challenges he faced building AI products internally. - Unlike traditional monitoring, Braintrust is designed to track AI-specific issues like model hallucinations and output drift, while Selector focuses on correlating data across the entire IT stack to find the root cause of service downtime. - Braintrust's platform is used by companies including Notion, Replit, Cloudflare, and Dropbox to manage production AI systems. - The global MLOps market was valued at over $2 billion in 2025 and is projected by some analysts to grow to nearly $26 billion by 2034. - The investment in Selector was driven by the need to solve what one investor called a "very expensive problem for very large companies," as even slight performance degradation is unacceptable for mission-critical infrastructure.
