Weights and Biases

Co-founded Weights & Biases in 2017 alongside Lukas Biewald and Shawn Lewis, drawing on deep experience in ML tooling from a prior startup exit. Previously co-founded CrowdFlower (later Figure Eight), a data annotation platform that was acquired by Appen in 2019 for up to $300M. Before that, served as a technical product manager at Powerset, a natural language search company acquired by Microsoft in 2008. Holds a BA in Computer Science from Hope College. Van Pelt's career has centered on building infrastructure for machine learning workflows, from training data (Figure Eight) to experiment tracking and production monitoring (Weights & Biases).

Earned a BS in Mathematics and an MS in Computer Science from Stanford, and is an expert-level Go player. Prior to Weights & Biases, co-founded CrowdFlower (later Figure Eight) in 2007, an early data-labeling platform that was acquired by Appen in 2019 for up to $300M. Earlier in his career, worked as a senior scientist at Powerset (acquired by Microsoft) and led the search relevance team at Yahoo! Japan. Co-founded Weights & Biases alongside Chris Van Pelt and Shawn Lewis to solve the pain point he experienced firsthand: the lack of good tools for tracking and reproducing ML experiments. Has been openly reflective about the failures of his first startup, including being removed as CEO, and has framed those lessons as directly informing how he approached building Weights & Biases.

Began his career as a software engineer at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory before spending four years as a Senior Software Engineer at Google. In 2011, he founded Beep Networks (a Y Combinator company building cellular networks for IoT), which ultimately shut down. That experience informed his approach to co-founding Weights & Biases in 2017 alongside Lukas Biewald and Chris Van Pelt, where he serves as CTO. He holds a degree from Virginia Tech.