Munich-based ZenML, the creator of the extensible open source Machine Learning Operationalization (MLOps) framework for data scientists, has raised $2.7 million in its seed round. It is led by Crane Venture Partners and includes notable investors, AI-researchers, and entrepreneurs like Richard Socher, Pieter Abbeel, Jim Keller, Dirk Hoke, Nicolas Dessaigne, Carsten Thoma, and others.

The company will use this funding to build out the tooling suite in the open and expand its team of ML technologists.

The ZenML framework is available as a lightweight Python library that lets data scientists express their ML workflows as pipelines. The steps within can be defined as Python functions that handle arbitrary tasks such as preprocessing data or training a model. Having defined these pipelines, ZenML now does the heavy lifting of orchestrating the workflow on any modern or legacy infrastructure.

“ZenML is designed to give data scientists a lot more ownership over their transitions to production and empowers them to communicate with production infrastructure in a much simpler way,” said Adam Probst, co-founder, ZenML. “We are passionate about the work we’re doing with data science teams and are dedicated to building a strong, sustainable open source community.”