CoreWeave said it will acquire OpenPipe, a Bellevue, Wash.-based startup that helps developers train AI agents using reinforcement learning. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Founded in 2023, OpenPipe helps companies build large language models tailored to their specific use cases, offering a cheaper and more efficient alternative to prompt-based approaches.
The company participated in Y Combinator’s summer cohort in 2023. It raised a $6.7 million seed round in 2024.
Reinforcement learning is a branch of artificial intelligence in which an algorithm (also known as an agent) learns to make decisions by trial and error, receiving rewards or penalties based on its actions.
OpenPipe’s strategy was that companies interested in using generative AI might not need a chatbot that can answer any question on any topic — but rather something that understands their product line and company policies deeply to provide customer service or other capabilities.
“Over the last two years we’ve helped hundreds of customers achieve state-of-the-art performance and reliability while saving millions of dollars by moving to smaller, faster, more reliable models,” OpenPipe CEO and co-founder Kyle Corbitt wrote on LinkedIn. “We’ve built one of the most popular libraries for training agents with reinforcement learning, which we’re improving daily.”
CoreWeave, a high-profile cloud infrastructure company focused on AI workloads that went public in March, said the deal builds on its recent acquisition of Weights & Biases to “deepen vertical integration across its technology stack.”
“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 co-founder Brian Venturo said in a statement.
Corbitt previously founded a family history startup called Emberall before joining Y Combinator, where he was an engineer for the startup accelerator and led Startup School, its founder community.
He co-founded OpenPipe with his brother, David Corbitt, a former engineer at Qualtrics and Palantir who co-founded a video legacy startup called GenerationalStory.
Costanoa Ventures, an early stage firm based in Silicon Valley, led OpenPipe’s seed round, which included participation from Y Combinator and individual backers such as Logan Kilpatrick, former head of developer relations at OpenAI, Alex Graveley, creator of GitHub Copilot, and Tom Preston-Werner, co-founder of GitHub.
OpenPipe’s employees will join CoreWeave. The company has 10 employees, according to LinkedIn.
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