Role at Weights & Biases
Mathematician and computer scientist who previously founded Crowdflower (Figure Eight, acquired by Appen) before launching Weights & Biases in 2017.
Weights & Biases
Artificial Intelligence & MLOps Developer PlatformFounded 2017- HQ today: San Francisco, California, USA
Reviewed by Swet Parvadiya
Company data updated: November 2026
Founders
Who Founded Weights & Biases?
Lukas Biewald, Chris Van Pelt, Shawn Lewis · Founded 2017 · HQ today: San Francisco, California, USA
Who founded Weights & Biases?
Weights & Biases was founded by Lukas Biewald, Chris Van Pelt, Shawn Lewis in 2017. It is now led by Lukas Biewald.
- Founders
- Lukas Biewald, Chris Van Pelt, Shawn Lewis
- Founded
- 2017
- Headquarters
- San Francisco, California, USA
- Number of founders
- 3
- Current CEO
- Lukas Biewald
- When was Weights & Biases founded?
- Weights & Biases was founded in 2017.
- Who started Weights & Biases?
- Weights & Biases was founded by Lukas Biewald, Chris Van Pelt and Shawn Lewis.
- How old is Weights & Biases?
- Weights & Biases is 9 years old as of 2026.
Founding Story
Lukas Biewald and Chris Van Pelt, who previously built human-in-the-loop data labeling platform Figure Eight (Crowdflower, acquired by Appen for $300M), teamed up with Shawn Lewis. Experiencing the frustrating lack of tooling while building machine learning models, they created W&B to give data scientists a visual, collaborative platform that tracked every code change, weight tensor, and dataset version automatically.
What each Weights & Biases founder did
| Founder | Role at founding | Contribution |
|---|---|---|
| Lukas Biewald | Co-Founder & CEO | — |
| Chris Van Pelt | Co-Founder | — |
| Shawn Lewis | Co-Founder & CTO | — |
Role at Weights & Biases
Computer scientist and engineer who co-founded Crowdflower and W&B, directing frontend visualization architecture and user experience.
Role at Weights & Biases
Systems architect and machine learning engineer who designed W&B's high-throughput telemetry ingestion backend and artifact lineage pipelines.
Weights & Biases: CEO & Leadership History
Full timeline →Lukas Biewald
Executive Leadership
Shawn Lewis
Engineering & Architecture
Keep researching Weights & Biases
Who Founded Weights & Biases? FAQ
Who founded Weights & Biases?
Weights & Biases was founded in 2017 by an entrepreneurial team committed to innovating Artificial Intelligence & MLOps Developer Platform.
What was the inspiration behind founding Weights & Biases?
The founders were inspired by the inefficiencies, high costs, and fragmented nature of legacy solutions, creating a modern, unified alternative.
Where was Weights & Biases originally created?
Weights & Biases was originally established in San Francisco, United States.
Are the original founders still involved?
The founding team established the cultural and technical DNA that continues to guide Weights & Biases's current executive strategy and product roadmap.
What early technical breakthroughs did the founders achieve?
They designed lightweight, scalable software architectures that bypassed the performance bottlenecks of legacy mainframe and client-server systems.
How did the founders fund the initial development?
Through initial personal savings, angel investments, and early customer design partnership revenues.
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