CoreWeave, a provider of cloud servers to large companies training AI models, has agreed to acquire OpenPipe. The two-year-old startup, which was backed by Y Combinator, helps enterprises develop customized AI agents with reinforcement learning. The companies announced the agreement on Wednesday.
In a statement, Brian Venturo, Co-founder of CoreWeave, explained the strategic move. He said reinforcement learning is emerging as a pivotal force to strengthen model performance on agentic and reasoning tasks. By combining OpenPipe’s advanced self-learning tools with CoreWeave’s high-performance AI cloud, the company is expanding its platform. This will give developers at AI labs and other organizations an important advantage in building scalable intelligent systems.
CoreWeave and OpenPipe did not disclose the financial terms of the deal. OpenPipe, which is based in Seattle, raised a $6.7 million seed round in March 2024. Its backers included Costanoa Ventures, Y Combinator, Google DeepMind’s Logan Kilpatrick, GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner, and GitHub Copilot co-creator Alex Graveley.
This acquisition represents CoreWeave’s latest effort to expand its services, following its March acquisition of the AI developer platform Weights & Biases. OpenPipe develops a popular open source toolkit for creating AI agents called ART, which stands for agent reinforcement trainer. While CoreWeave’s biggest customers include leading AI labs like OpenAI, the company is also working to appeal to smaller enterprises.
A growing number of AI labs and startups are building enterprise products around reinforcement learning. This process involves rewarding AI models for correct responses and has proven to be a strong method for improving a model’s performance on a specific task. The goal of these enterprise products is to train AI agents that are specifically tailored to a company’s unique needs.
This kind of customer-specific training requires significant computing resources. Through the acquisition of OpenPipe, CoreWeave aims to both provide the computing power for and directly offer such services. As part of the deal, OpenPipe’s team will join CoreWeave, and existing OpenPipe customers will become CoreWeave customers.