Fluvio Ventures Celebrates Freeplay's Seed Funding and Open Beta Launch
WRITTEN BY Devon O’Rourke, Founder & Managing Partner
Today marks a milestone not just for Freeplay, but for the broader tech ecosystem. At Fluvio Ventures, we are ecstatic to unveil our inaugural investment in Freeplay, the end-to-end platform for software companies to ship great products with LLMs. Businesses can now get access to Freeplay’s collaborative, enterprise-ready tools for building, testing and optimizing LLM-powered products. Our belief and enthusiasm stem from a few distinctive factors.
The Team: Our investment in Freeplay was catalyzed by our profound faith in the capability and vision of its leadership. Co-founders Ian Cairns and Eric Ryan have exceptional acumen and a rich heritage in developer API engineering (formerly at Gnip and Twitter), which we believe gives them a unique advantage. We’ve also had the opportunity to work with Ian during his previous role as VP of Product at Firstbase and were blown away by his exceptionally thoughtful, bright, and technical mindset.
The New Frontier: We're at the cusp of a paradigm shift, we believe every company is, or will need to be, an AI company. Freeplay is at the helm of this transformation, providing an end-to-end platform for businesses to build, test, and optimize LLM-powered products, marking a leap toward democratizing AI technologies.
The Go-to-market Strategy: By crafting a platform that caters to both developers and non-developers, Freeplay is lowering the barrier to entry and promoting a culture of collaborative innovation reminiscent of how Figma transformed design processes. We believe this approach is better positioned than other ecosystem players that are focusing on narrow use cases, and don’t cover the full development lifecycle.
How Freeplay Works
Freeplay offers a comprehensive workflow that streamlines the process of building, testing, and optimizing LLM-powered products. Teams can effortlessly iterate on prompts, monitor outcomes, and curate data for testing or fine-tuning, all under one roof. They can conduct evaluations using a blend of automated and human methods to ensure accuracy and relevance. Moreover, with easy integration through developer SDKs, managing and versioning prompts becomes a breeze. Engineers and collaborators can adjust prompts and switch models or providers across environments without the need to delve into the codebase every time, making experimentation flexible and convenient.
On the monitoring front, Freeplay records LLM requests/responses, presenting them in an intuitive observability dashboard. This allows teams to delve into the metrics, understanding prompt versions, input variables, LLM completions, costs, and latency among other critical data. The platform facilitates an integrated workflow to label results and curate datasets for testing, and the ability to save sessions as test cases, ensuring consistency in testing and result comparison over iterations. Further enhancing the efficacy are the AI evaluators which instantaneously score results, aiding in automating the testing process and comparing results across versions for better insights. With developer control at its core, Freeplay provides SDKs for seamless integration with existing tech stacks. Additionally, its enterprise-ready features such as role-based access controls, industry-standard security, and privacy controls ensure it's poised to meet the collaborative and security needs of modern organizations, making it a robust platform for both developers and non-developers alike.
As Freeplay moves into public beta, we at Fluvio Ventures are thrilled to be part of this journey. Today's milestone reaffirms our commitment to investing in technologies, companies, and teams that are driving innovation forward.