CoreWeave— a company that provides cloud server solutions for large enterprises training AI models— has announced a deal to acquire OpenPipe, a two-year-old startup backed by Y Combinator. OpenPipe specializes in helping businesses build customized AI agents using reinforcement learning, with the acquisition formally revealed by both companies on Wednesday.
“Reinforcement learning is quickly becoming a critical driver for enhancing model performance in agent-focused and reasoning-based tasks,” Brian Venturo, co-founder of CoreWeave, stated to TechCrunch. “By integrating OpenPipe’s advanced self-learning tools with CoreWeave’s high-performance AI cloud infrastructure, we’re expanding our platform’s capabilities. This will give developers at AI laboratories and other organizations a key edge in building intelligent systems that are both scalable and powerful.”
The financial terms of the acquisition, including the purchase price, were not disclosed by CoreWeave or OpenPipe. Notably, OpenPipe—headquartered in Seattle—secured a $6.7 million seed funding round in March 2024. Its backers included prominent names such as Costanoa Ventures, Y Combinator, Logan Kilpatrick of Google DeepMind, Tom Preston-Werner (co-founder of GitHub), and Alex Graveley (co-creator of GitHub Copilot).
This acquisition marks CoreWeave’s latest move to expand its offerings across the AI technology stack. It follows the company’s purchase of Weights & Biases, an AI developer platform, in March of this year. OpenPipe is best known for developing ART (Agent Reinforcement Trainer), a widely used open-source toolkit designed to streamline the creation of AI agents. While CoreWeave’s client base includes major AI labs like OpenAI, the company has also been working to broaden its appeal to smaller enterprises— a goal the OpenPipe acquisition is expected to support.
In recent months, a growing number of AI labs and startups have been developing enterprise-focused products centered on reinforcement learning. This technique works by rewarding AI models for generating correct or useful responses, making it highly effective for boosting a model’s performance on specific, targeted tasks. The core value of these enterprise tools lies in their ability to train AI agents that are tailored to a company’s unique needs, whether for customer service, data analysis, or other specialized use cases.
Such customer-specific AI training demands significant computing resources— an area where CoreWeave already excels. By acquiring OpenPipe, CoreWeave aims to both power this resource-intensive process and directly offer reinforcement learning-driven agent development services to its clients. As part of the deal, OpenPipe’s entire team will join CoreWeave, and OpenPipe’s existing customers will be transitioned to CoreWeave’s client roster.