What is it about the funding environment that makes VCs suddenly willing to fund companies built around open source python libraries? They generally aren't beating the AI drum, but are they benefiting by proximity to AI via python?
The popular open source projects make great targets for low-multiple acqui-hires, derisking the investment. They also have huge established branding and generally obvious opportunities for displacing existing players. In a non-zero interest rate environment, those factors make established open source projects a more appealing bet.
Since they mentioned the company, undercutting and eating the market share of DataBricks is enough to appeal to some investors.
Compare:
Funding databases is some of the most appealing for sw infra VC b/c as business fundamentals like monetization (pay for hosting, data, etc), growth, retention, are some of the most successful & low-risk
Funding the sw compute tier is a peg down but appealing for similar reasons. Basically same-but-weaker than DBs on the above dimensions, but still worth it as customers struggle w/ compute at scale (technical + business), so still works. Think early databricks vs snowflake, and how databricks grew to owning more than compute to data lakehouse, dashboards, etc: started as pure compute and now closer to snowflake.
Python is popular for a lot of these compute tier stacks. Orchestrators, AI, ETL, etc. The technical, social, & economic reasons are all interesting & relevant for why.
That's similar to anyscale (ray), coiled & saturncloud (dask), and early databricks (spark). Managing infra for that kind of thing is annoying. These companies don't OSS their cloud stack.
Wishing them luck! A lot of arrow-core compute tier & db co's emerging, so cool to see the many years paying off.
That's what I had missed - thanks.