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AI OSS tool repo goes archived over night after raising $7.3M Seed

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Re: AI OSS tool repo goes archived over night after raising $7.3M Seed

#101

Post by GabrielBianconi »

cluckindan wrote: post #98
GabrielBianconi wrote: post #83

I'm the co-founder and CEO of TensorZero. We started the company two and a half years ago, and raised $7.3m in 2024 (announced only almost a year later). We've spent less than half of this amount. Earlier this week we came to the difficult decision to wind down the project. The open-source repository remains available on GitHub (Apache 2.0) but won't be actively maintained by the team moving forward.

What did you spend the money on? The other half goes where?

Mostly salaries to support a small team.

We are returning the remaining capital to investors.

Re: AI OSS tool repo goes archived over night after raising $7.3M Seed

#103

Post by GabrielBianconi »

dpkirchner wrote: post #70
pqtyw wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well.. if that's it it's not really much to shown for if you spent $7 million on it.

It's not even clear they spent all the money. Maybe it just wasn't a viable product.

Yeah exactly. We didn't spend the majority of it.

Re: AI OSS tool repo goes archived over night after raising $7.3M Seed

#104

Post by GabrielBianconi »

pavlov wrote: post #17

This is the claim in the repo readme that presumably unlocked the VC investment: “TensorZero is used by companies ranging from frontier AI startups to the Fortune 10 and fuels ~1% of global LLM API spend today.” One percent seems like a lot. Anyone on HN use this?

We raised most of the capital before we had any traction. We raised on a rolling basis and had millions in the bank before we had even published the open-source repository. Ultimately we raised based on the team's background + vision.

The ~1% figure might be outdated today but it was a best-effort estimate a couple of months ago. TensorZero powered tens of trillions of inference tokens per month. TensorZero is not widely used but it was used by a couple of extreme-scale users.

Re: AI OSS tool repo goes archived over night after raising $7.3M Seed

#105

Post by bicx »

devops000 wrote: post #97
GabrielBianconi wrote: post #83

I'm the co-founder and CEO of TensorZero. We started the company two and a half years ago, and raised $7.3m in 2024 (announced only almost a year later). We've spent less than half of this amount. Earlier this week we came to the difficult decision to wind down the project. The open-source repository remains available on GitHub (Apache 2.0) but won't be actively maintained by the team moving forward.

[flagged]

The story of literally 95% of tech startups

Re: AI OSS tool repo goes archived over night after raising $7.3M Seed

#106

Post by knightops_dev »

kmac_ wrote: post #36

About one year ago, I created an LLM gateway with metrics, provider fallback and switching, tools support, injecting, etc. etc., and unique features like acting as an MCP tools client and server, all streamed, with low latency. It was a simple project in terms of technical complexity. I didn't publish it as I counted several similar projects in the field. Putting $7.3M into such a project would make sense only in the…

[flagged]

Re: AI OSS tool repo goes archived over night after raising $7.3M Seed

#107

Post by satvikpendem »

devops000 wrote: post #97
GabrielBianconi wrote: post #83

I'm the co-founder and CEO of TensorZero. We started the company two and a half years ago, and raised $7.3m in 2024 (announced only almost a year later). We've spent less than half of this amount. Earlier this week we came to the difficult decision to wind down the project. The open-source repository remains available on GitHub (Apache 2.0) but won't be actively maintained by the team moving forward.

[flagged]

LinkedIn is the worst platform to get accurate news as everyone is only incentivized to hype themselves up. Lots of examples abound in r/LinkedInLunatics

Re: AI OSS tool repo goes archived over night after raising $7.3M Seed

#108

Post by j45 »

rfgplk wrote: post #67
RobotToaster wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Burning through $7m in 9 months? That's an impressive amount of avocado toast.

$7m actually isn't a whole lot, especially if they hired a (larger) engineering team. Assuming their cali based, that's easily 150-200k per engineer, a team of 20 easily eats through that. Idk the specifics, but I don't the organization was fradulent, it could also be that they're going commercial and no longer want to maintain their oss stack

Tokenmaxxing makes startups even leakier if they don't find token traction.

Re: AI OSS tool repo goes archived over night after raising $7.3M Seed

#110

Post by Barbing »

GabrielBianconi wrote: post #101
cluckindan wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did you spend the money on? The other half goes where?

Mostly salaries to support a small team. We are returning the remaining capital to investors.

I’ve never heard of this before. Anyone know if it’s uncommon?

Familiar with creditors getting divvied in bankruptcies, but not refunds to investors… oh it’s because there’s never any money left when things wind down. (We hear of retail stores where employees discover closures posted on shop doors when reporting to work.)

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