[Funding alert] San Francisco-based tech startup CatalyzeX raises $1.64M in seed round from Silicon Valley investors

San Francisco-based tech startup CatalyzeX on Tuesday said it has raised $1.64 million in seed funding from Silicon Valley investors — Unshackled Ventures, Darling Ventures, Kepler Ventures, On Deck, Abstraction Capital, Unpopular Ventures, and Basecamp Fund.

Indian angel investors Ritesh Malik (Founder and CEO at Innov8) and Akshay Chaturvedi (Founder and CEO of Leverage Edu) also participated in the round along with others, including Anthony Goldbloom (Co-founder and CEO of Kaggle), Joe Fernandez (Co-founder and CEO of Klout), Binh Tran (Co-founder of Klout, partner at 500 Startups), Slava Kovalevskyi (Google Cloud AI manager), Ilya Kirnos (Founding Partner and CTO at SignalFire) and Michael Shuffett (Founder and CEO at Compose AI). 

The startup had previously raised a pre-seed round of undisclosed amount from angel investor Binh Tran. 

Co-founded by Delhi-based brother duo Gaurav and Himanshu Ragtah, CatalyzeX is building a platform to help developers find the right machine learning techniques, code, and know-how faster. Incorporated in 2017, the startup offers a website for easily looking up machine learning techniques and their code implementations.  While the legal entity was registered in 2017, the founders had started building the CatalyzeX in 2019.

It also has browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox that automatically find and show you relevant code implementations for any machine learning papers you come across while browsing the web. The product makes it easy to get in touch with authors to ask them any questions or get clarifications. 

“There are hundreds of new developments in AI research every day, but developers face a lot of friction in finding the right code and know-how to actually implement them. Our goal is to make AI more accessible for builders and makers — and supercharge technological progress for humanity,” said Gaurav, who along with his brother, holds a background in artificial intelligence. 

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Gaurav had previously led fraud prevention at Yelp and drove several machine learning and data engineering projects at Google, Klout, and Columbia University while Himanshu has a background in intelligent systems and previously worked on manufacturing test automation at Tesla. 

The startup currently has over 30,000 weekly active users comprising of  developers, data scientists, and applied researchers from both startups and larger institutions around the world. 

“We're already serving over 0.5 million code implementations per day and aim to expand from 30,000 weekly active users supported today by multiple orders of magnitude,” said Gaurav. 

Moving forward, CatalyzeX has integrations and partnerships planned with several code collaboration and AI research platforms. The startup also plans to hire engineers and product designers in India and will be actively pursuing talent across the country.

“India is among the top three countries by number of users in the CatalyzeX network today, which also closely reflects the emerging leaders in the global artificial intelligence ecosystem. Given our focus on making AI increasingly accessible for developers and technical non-experts to accelerate technological progress across industries, India is undoubtedly an important market for CatalyzeX,” said Gaurav.