OpenAI will acquire Neptune, a venture-backed start-up that provides monitoring and debugging software for artificial-intelligence training, the companies said on Wednesday.
Terms were not disclosed, but three people familiar with the transaction said OpenAI will hand over less than $400 million in stock. The deal is expected to close in the coming months, subject to customary approvals.
Neptune, spun out of Polish consultancy Deepsense in 2018, has raised roughly $18 million from Almaz Capital, TDJ Pitango Ventures and others. Its cloud dashboard is already used by Samsung, Roche, HP and—since last year—OpenAI itself to track metrics during GPT training runs.
Chief executive Piotr Niedźwiedź told customers that external services will be wound down and that staff will “work even more closely” with OpenAI once the takeover is complete. OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki said Neptune’s tools will be “integrated deep into our training stack to expand visibility into how models learn.”
The purchase continues an acquisition spree at the ChatGPT maker. In the past seven months it has also bought interface designer Software Applications Inc., testing platform Statsig for a reported $1.1 billion, and Jony Ive’s hardware venture io for more than $6 billion.
OpenAI was valued at about $500 billion in October after employees sold $6.6 billion of shares in a tender offer.