Insider Brief
- Zipline AI raised $7M in seed funding led by Wing VC with participation from Stripe, Box Group, and Exceptional Capital to expand its team and launch its enterprise AI data platform.
- Built on the open-source Chronon engine (created at Airbnb and Stripe), Zipline unifies data pipelines, serving infrastructure, and observability into one system, enabling faster, cheaper, and more efficient AI/ML development and deployment.
- Already used by companies like Netflix, Uber, Roku, and OpenAI, Zipline extends Chronon into a developer-friendly platform designed to scale enterprise AI workflows with improved governance and cost savings.
PRESS RELEASE — Zipline AI, the next-generation data platform improving how enterprises develop and deploy AI products, announced it has raised $7 million in seed funding led by Wing VC, with participation from Stripe, Box Group, and Exceptional Capital. The funding will be used to grow the team and bring Zipline’s platform to market, which was designed to accelerate the development cycle and reduce the complexity of AI workflows.
Developing AI applications typically requires months of complex work, including building data pipelines, serving infrastructure, and managing observability tools. These challenges are only increasing as existing infrastructure tools struggle to keep up with the new age of AI use cases. Zipline streamlines this process by unifying these components into a single platform powered by a highly efficient compute engine. This allows teams to go to production quickly and safely.
Zipline builds on Chronon, an open-source data engine developed by the company’s co-founders, Varant Zanoyan and Nikhil Simha Raprolu, during their time leading the AI data platform team at Airbnb. Chronon is jointly owned by Airbnb and Stripe, and has recently gotten adoption from companies like Netflix, Uber, Roku and Open AI.
“Building AI systems is still a long and complicated process for most companies,” said Varant Zanoyan, Co-founder of Zipline AI. “We’re tackling that complexity head-on, making it faster and easier for teams to develop and deploy AI products while reducing costs and improving observability and governance.”
With Zipline, the team is extending Chronon’s capabilities into a developer-friendly platform to meet the broader needs of enterprises.
“Zipline delivers the core data infrastructure AI teams need to build, deploy, manage, and monitor data pipelines at scale,” said Chris Zeoli, Partner at Wing VC. “Built for scale at Airbnb and Stripe, its open-source platform now powers many of the world’s leading AI applications — including OpenAI, Netflix, Uber, Roku and many others. AI is driving new product requirements from data engineering infrastructure, and Zipline is a core part of that foundation.”
“Chronon has been the ideal feature platform,” said Krishna Chaitanya C., Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Roku. “Its config-based feature engineering and consistent use across training and serving have been game-changers. Since adopting Chronon, we’ve seen a 6x cost reduction and a 3x boost in runtime efficiency.”
Zipline is planning to announce key partnerships in the coming months, and its open-source foundation has already gained traction among organizations seeking to streamline AI/ML workflows at scale.
To learn more about Zipline AI, please visit Zipline.ai.
About Zipline
Zipline AI is a next-generation data platform helping enterprises accelerate AI/ML development with faster deployment, integrated governance, and lower infrastructure costs. Founded by a team of engineers with decades of experience building AI/ML infrastructure at companies like Airbnb, Stripe, Meta, Google, and Palantir, Zipline builds on the proven foundation of Chronon, an open-source engine that powers AI/ML applications at Airbnb, Stripe, and more. Zipline’s platform simplifies data pipelines, serving infrastructure, and observability to help teams focus on delivering AI systems. Backed by Wing VC, Stripe, Box Group, and Exceptional Capital, Zipline is redefining how enterprises build and scale AI/ML products.
