SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 22, 2023--
Rubber Ducky Labs, a company dedicated to making recommender systems easier to build and imbue with human knowledge, today announces $1.5 million seed investment round led by Bain Capital Ventures with participation from Cadenza Ventures and angel investors including Brad Klingenberg (ex-Chief Algorithms Officer at Stitch Fix), Patrick Hayes (co-founder of SigOpt), and Dave Aronchick (co-founder of Bacalhau and Expanso). Rubber Ducky Labs completed Y Combinator in Winter 2023.
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Alexandra Johnson (CEO), Georgia Hong (CTO) (Photo Credit: Nick Walder)
Recommender systems are at the heart of many e-commerce and content discovery products, ensuring the customer sees the products that they’re most likely to purchase. These systems are unique within machine learning because they directly drive revenue, but they don’t fit nicely into existing machine learning tool chains.
By establishing a paved path for analyzing and iterating on recommender systems, Rubber Ducky Labs gives teams the answers they’re looking for in minutes instead of days. Data-driven insights are built into the product, enabling teams to explore data visually, inclusive of product images, and drill down into metrics on individual items or Users.
Rubber Ducky Labs was founded in 2022 by Alexandra Johnson, an engineer with a background in fashion at Polyvore, and then a machine learning-focused developer at SigOpt. Johnson holds two patents in ML tooling and holds a computer science degree from Carnegie Mellon University. Her co-founder, Georgia Hong is CTO of Rubber Ducky Labs. Hong’s background includes infrastructure work at Meta, Datadog, SigOpt and Cockroach Labs.
“Your recommender system can make you a lot of money, or get you into a lot of trouble, so you want to pay close attention to it,” said Rubber Ducky Labs co-founder & CEO Alexandra Johnson. “We’re the building tools to let you do that.”
“We’re thrilled to be working with Alexandra and Georgia to solve the problem of recommender systems teams getting bogged down building their own monitoring and operations toolchain because general purpose ML tools don’t meet their specific demands,” said Bain Capital Ventures partner Slater Stich. “Rec sys teams deserve a platform like Rubber Ducky Labs to focus more on core algorithm development and less on operations and analytics tooling.”
The team is looking for e-commerce, consumer marketplace, content discovery, or video game companies who share their vision for revolutionizing the way recommender systems are developed and optimized to join their private alpha. Visit Rubber Ducky Labs to learn more.
About Rubber Ducky Labs:
Rubber Ducky Labs builds operational analytics for recommender systems. We build tools to debug, analyze, and improve recommender systems, allowing machine learning teams to move faster on projects that have a direct impact on the company’s bottom line. Based in San Francisco, Rubber Ducky Labs was founded in 2022 by engineers with a background in retail tech, ML tooling, and infrastructure, having worked for Polyvore, SigOpt, Meta and Datadog.
View source version on businesswire.com:https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230622519399/en/
CONTACT: Press Contact:
Allison Braley
Bain Capital Ventures
abraley@baincapital.com
KEYWORD: UNITED STATES NORTH AMERICA CALIFORNIA
INDUSTRY KEYWORD: DATA ANALYTICS DATA MANAGEMENT PROFESSIONAL SERVICES TECHNOLOGY SOFTWARE
SOURCE: Rubber Ducky Labs
Copyright Business Wire 2023.
PUB: 06/22/2023 01:15 PM/DISC: 06/22/2023 01:15 PM
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230622519399/en
