Malte Pietsch, CTO & Co-Founder of Deepset: $45 Million Raised to Build the Future of LLMs

Welcome to another episode of Category Visionaries — the show that explores GTM stories from tech's most innovative B2B founders. In today's episode, we're speaking with Malte Pietsch, CTO & Co-Founder of Deepset, an enterprise LLM platform that has raised over $45 Million in funding.

Here are the most interesting points from our conversation:

• Deepset's Mission: Deepset aims to enable the transformation towards intelligent applications by allowing engineering teams to build, evaluate, and rapidly deploy AI features necessary for their products.
• Product Offering: Deepset provides two key products: Haystack, an open-source framework for orchestrating AI applications into pipelines for individual devs, and Deepset Cloud, a SaaS platform for enterprise teams to build, deploy, and manage AI features at scale.
• The Impact of ChatGPT: The release of ChatGPT marked a significant turning point for AI, shifting from niche applications to mainstream awareness and adoption. This brought new challenges and opportunities for Deepset in navigating a market with increased interest and competition.
• Early Convictions and Challenges: Despite the uncertainties in the early stages of AI's market acceptance, Deepset's team held a strong conviction about the potential of AI in transforming interactions with machines. This belief, coupled with their close work with customers, fueled their perseverance through periods of doubt.
• Rising Above Noise: In a post-ChatGPT world teeming with AI startups and funding, Deepset focuses on demonstrating clear business value by transitioning from prototype to production, highlighting their commitment to solving real-world use cases over merely creating impressive demos.
• Open Source and Commercial Products: Deepset's journey included an early focus on open-source projects, leading to the development of their commercial platform, Deepset Cloud. This dual approach has allowed them to build a community, establish credibility, and cater to a broad spectrum of developers and enterprise customers.