CoreWeave, which provides cloud servers to large companies training AI models, has struck an agreement to acquire OpenPipe, a two-year-old Y Combinator-backed startup that helps enterprises develop customized AI agents with reinforcement learning, the companies announced on Wednesday.
“Reinforcement learning is emerging as a pivotal force to strengthen model performance on agentic and reasoning tasks,” said Brian Venturo, co-founder of CoreWeave, in a statement to TechCrunch. “By combining OpenPipe’s advanced self-learning tools with CoreWeave’s high-performance AI cloud, we’re expanding our platform to give developers at AI labs and beyond an important advantage in building scalable intelligent systems.”
CoreWeave and OpenPipe did not disclose the terms of the deal. In March 2024, the Seattle-based OpenPipe raised a $6.7 million seed round, with backers including Costanoa Ventures, Y Combinator, Google DeepMind’s Logan Kilpatrick, GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner, and GitHub Copilot co-creator Alex Graveley.
The deal marks CoreWeave’s latest attempt to expand up and down the stack, following its acquisition of the AI developer platform Weights & Biases in March. OpenPipe develops a popular open source toolkit for creating AI agents called ART (agent reinforcement trainer). While many of CoreWeave’s biggest customers include leading AI labs such as OpenAI, the company is also trying to appeal to smaller enterprises.
A growing number of AI labs and startups are building out enterprise products around reinforcement learning, which involves rewarding AI models for correct responses. Reinforcement learning has proven a strong way to improve an AI model’s performance on a specific task; the idea with these enterprise products is to train AI agents specifically for a company’s needs.
This kind of customer-specific training requires a lot of computing resources, and by acquiring OpenPipe, CoreWeave hopes to both power and offer such services. OpenPipe’s team will be joining CoreWeave, and customers of OpenPipe will become CoreWeave customers.
