CoreWeave Acquires OpenPipe to Expand AI Cloud Offerings and Boost Customized Reinforcement Learning Capabilities

Leading AI cloud service provider, CoreWeave, has announced its acquisition of OpenPipe, a two-year-old startup specializing in developing customized AI agents with reinforcement learning. The deal was made public on Wednesday.

“Reinforcement learning is rapidly emerging as a critical factor in enhancing model performance for agentic and reasoning tasks,” stated Brian Venturo, co-founder of CoreWeave. “By integrating OpenPipe’s advanced self-learning tools with our high-performance AI cloud, we aim to provide developers at AI labs and beyond a significant edge in creating scalable intelligent systems.”

Details regarding the terms of the deal were not disclosed. In March 2024, OpenPipe secured a $6.7 million seed round, with investments from Costanoa Ventures, Y Combinator, Logan Kilpatrick from Google DeepMind, Tom Preston-Werner, co-founder of GitHub, and Alex Graveley, co-creator of GitHub Copilot.

The acquisition marks CoreWeave’s latest move to extend its reach across the technology stack, following its acquisition of AI developer platform Weights & Biases in March. OpenPipe is renowned for creating a popular open source toolkit for developing AI agents named ART (agent reinforcement trainer). While many of CoreWeave’s major clients include prominent AI labs such as OpenAI, the company also aims to cater to smaller enterprises.

An increasing number of AI labs and startups are focusing on building enterprise products around reinforcement learning, which involves reinforcing AI models for accurate responses. Reinforcement learning has demonstrated effective results in improving an AI model’s performance on specific tasks; the objective with these enterprise products is to train AI agents tailored to a company’s unique needs.

This customer-specific training demands substantial computing resources, and by acquiring OpenPipe, CoreWeave intends to provide both the power and the services necessary for such training. The OpenPipe team will be joining CoreWeave, and OpenPipe’s customers will transition to becoming CoreWeave customers.