Sumble, an AI research and collaboration startup founded by Anthony Goldbloom and Ben Hamner, has raised an impressive $38.5 million in Seed funding to revolutionize how teams collaborate on machine learning projects and manage complex data pipelines. The round was led by Coatue Management, with participation from Canaan, AIX Ventures, Square Peg, Bloomberg Beta, Zetta, and industry leaders like Marc Benioff and Nat Friedman.

Known for their success in building Kaggle, the world’s largest data-science competition platform, Goldbloom and Hamner are now channeling that same collaborative spirit into a new generation of AI tooling designed for the enterprise era.

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Reimagining Collaboration for the AI Age

Modern data teams are drowning in complexity. Between scattered datasets, disjointed tools, and regulatory overhead, collaboration often becomes the biggest obstacle to innovation. Sumble was built to eliminate that friction.

The platform unifies the entire AI lifecycle - from data preparation and experimentation to deployment - into one secure, collaborative environment. Engineers, analysts, and researchers can now work together seamlessly, viewing every experiment, model, and dataset in real time.

“Our mission is to make data science collaborative again,” said Anthony Goldbloom, CEO of Sumble. “We learned from Kaggle that when you connect the right people around the right data, breakthroughs happen faster than anyone expects.”

This philosophy anchors Sumble’s core product design: a GitHub for AI, where reproducibility, transparency, and automation become the foundation of every decision.

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Closing the Industry’s Most Costly Gap

AI today is less about building smarter models - and more about building smarter systems. For most enterprises, inefficiencies in collaboration, compliance, and data lineage account for up to 60% of wasted development time. Sumble addresses this directly by centralizing version control, security, and experimentation under one roof.

Through features like dynamic access control, live collaboration notebooks, and end-to-end traceability, Sumble ensures teams never lose visibility into what’s changing, who changed it, and why it matters.

But here’s the deeper insight that makes Sumble’s approach so transformative - and a strategic signal every founder should pay attention to:

When startups build infrastructure for collaboration, they’re not just solving workflow inefficiency - they’re shaping how intelligence itself is organized. What Sumble is quietly doing is reframing “collaboration” as a form of network intelligence, where every user interaction compounds the product’s long-term defensibility.

The more teams use it, the smarter and more indispensable it becomes. That’s not a network effect - it’s a compounding learning effect.

For founders, this is the new playbook for deep-tech success: don’t compete to own outcomes - compete to own the iteration loops that lead to those outcomes. Sumble’s brilliance lies in embedding itself into the everyday rhythm of creation. When your product becomes the default environment where ideas are tested, refined, and deployed, you don’t just win market share - you define the market’s tempo.

This shift - from tools that deliver results to systems that govern how results are created - is the foundation of every enduring infrastructure company. And it’s exactly where Sumble is staking its claim.

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A Deep Bench of Global Investors

Sumble’s $38.5M seed round drew in some of the most experienced investors in AI and enterprise software. Coatue Management leads the charge, joined by Canaan, AIX Ventures, and Square Peg - firms known for backing transformational infrastructure plays.

Adding to the roster are Bloomberg Beta and Zetta, both with deep experience in data and developer tooling. The presence of Marc Benioff and Nat Friedman underscores the strategic weight of this round - each of them has previously backed category-defining collaboration tools like GitHub, Slack, and Snowflake.

Their collective bet on Sumble signals confidence that the startup isn’t just another AI platform - it’s the framework for the next decade of enterprise intelligence.

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The Technology Advantage

At a technical level, Sumble merges data governance, model experimentation, and compliance automation into one living system. It allows users to:

• Collaborate on shared AI projects through real-time notebooks.
  
• Track every dataset, model, and version with full reproducibility.
  
• Ensure compliance through automated permissions and data masking.
  
• Benchmark performance across teams or organizations securely.
  

In doing so, Sumble transforms what was once a patchwork of tools into a single, trusted layer - something both startups and Fortune 500s have been waiting for.

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The Perfect Timing for a New Category

Industry analysts estimate that by 2027, over 70% of enterprises will deploy AI models in production, yet less than 20% will do so efficiently due to process fragmentation. That inefficiency represents a multi-billion-dollar opportunity - and Sumble’s platform lands right at the heart of it.

The shift to collaborative AI development mirrors the earlier rise of DevOps. Just as GitHub redefined how developers share code, Sumble is redefining how data teams share intelligence. By giving teams the ability to collaborate with full transparency and compliance, it positions itself as the AI operating layer every enterprise needs - but few have built internally.

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What’s Next for Sumble

With the new funding, Sumble plans to expand its engineering and AI research teams, accelerate integration with major cloud providers, and roll out enhanced privacy features like federated model learning and cross-company collaboration environments.

The company is also building AI copilots to help data scientists automate documentation, detect anomalies, and recommend new experiment directions. The vision is not just to make collaboration possible - but to make it intelligent.

As Goldbloom and Hamner put it, the future of AI development will belong to platforms that understand both the human and technical sides of creation. And with its powerhouse investor network, proven founding team, and first-mover advantage, Sumble is positioned to become that central hub - the place where the world’s next AI breakthroughs begin.

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