About Union
Union.ai was founded in 2021 by the engineers who created Flyte™.
Union’s mission: to orchestrate the processes required to train and run the most complex and dynamic machine learning and data products at scale.
During our time at Lyft, we encountered numerous challenges faced by ML and data processing teams. In response to these challenges, we created Flyte™, a platform for orchestrating machine learning and data processing jobs. Initially, our small team launched Flyte™ in late 2016 to deliver models for a core product — estimated time of arrival (ETA) and quickly expanded across the organization.
In early 2020, we open-sourced Flyte™, and it became the 25th hosted project of the Linux Foundation AI & Data. Shortly after, the pandemic's onset presented a crossroad, and prompted the decision to not just continue but expand our work, ultimately leading to the formation of Union.ai. [Union.ai] has since become the driving force behind Flyte™, which has been adopted by over 500 organizations and production teams worldwide.
As the Flyte™ community grew, we observed that many users faced infrastructure challenges when setting up a Kubernetes-native platform. To help accelerate the development of data and ML products, we developed Union, a managed version of Flyte™, to simplify the adoption of Flyte™ for enterprises, mid-sized organizations, and even small teams.
Continued support for open source
In 2022, we welcomed Pandera into the Union.ai family. Pandera is a powerful tool designed to perform complex data validation tasks while maintaining a user-friendly API. It enables data scientists and engineers to define, validate, and document data schemas seamlessly, ensuring data consistency and quality throughout the pipeline.
By incorporating Pandera into the Union.ai ecosystem, we strive to offer our users a comprehensive set of tools to manage their data workflows more effectively. With Pandera's capabilities, we can tackle data quality challenges and ensure that ML models and data-driven insights are based on reliable and consistent information.
A shared vision for the future of data & ML
Moving forward, we will continue to introduce features that benefit the entire community, such as global sharing, enhanced visualization, and services to improve Kubernetes deployments. Our dedication to simplifying data workflows and empowering efficient ML and data teams remains central to our mission.
We are global
We are a geographically distributed company, and you can find our employees in these locations:
Our investors & advisors
Scott Sandell is Chairman, CEO and Chief Investment Officer of NEA. Since joining the firm in 1996, Scott has led investments in a wide range of technology companies and has played a role in many industry-transforming businesses including Bloom Energy, Cloudflare, Data Domain, Robinhood, Salesforce.com, Tableau Software, and Workday. Scott is currently the lead independent director of both Cloudflare (NYSE: NET) and Coursera (NYSE: COUR). Scott also serves on the boards of a number of private companies including Bliq, Branch, GoodLeap, Inkitt, Merge, One Concern and Union. He also remains actively involved with the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), where he served as Chairman of the Board from 2014-2015, and is a founding director of Venture Forward, a nonprofit launched by the NVCA with a focus on areas critical to the future and strength of the VC industry – history, education, diversity, equity & inclusion, and research & data. In 2019, he received the NVCA Outstanding Service Award for his significant contributions to the venture community.
Outside of NEA, Scott is currently an Adjunct Lecturer at Stanford University in the Department of Management Science and Engineering in the School of Engineering where he co-teaches a course on principled entrepreneurship. He also previously served on the Board of Advisors of the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth for over a decade (from 2009 – 2021) and is currently an emeritus member.
Before joining NEA, Scott was a product manager at Microsoft. Prior to that, Scott co-founded and ran the European subsidiary of C-ATS Software. He began his career at the Boston Consulting Group. Scott holds an MBA from Stanford and an AB in Engineering Sciences from Dartmouth College.
Greg joined NEA as Venture Partner in 2010 after more than twenty years of experience in the technology industry and academia. He focuses on early-stage systems, software and deep/hard tech companies. Prior to NEA, Greg was EVP and CTO of Sun Microsystems, where he guided the company’s $2B R&D portfolio. Before Sun, Greg was an Associate Professor of EECS at MIT, where he worked on massively parallel dataflow computing architectures. He also helped found a number of companies, from video conferencing (PictureTel) to computational fluid dynamics (NASDAQ:EXA), and was an engineer with HP and Honeywell.
Greg is an active advisor for the schools of engineering at UCSD, UC Berkeley and SJSU, and is a trustee for the UCSD Foundation and the Computer History Museum. Passionate about technology and its possibilities, Greg is a relentless advocate for diversity in engineering and a supporter of open development models that stimulate communication, inclusiveness and innovation. Greg holds an undergraduate degree from UCSD and an S.M. and Ph.D. from MIT. He is also a Senior Fellow of the American Leadership Forum.
Manish is a Silicon Valley veteran who solves problems at the intersection of business, technology, and human experience. He follows his passion for technologies that address deep needs and evolve to products which become part of everyday life.
At Google, Manish was fortunate to lead and collaborate with teams that designed, developed, and scaled products with global impact including Google Ads, TV, and Maps. In addition, he built a few products that were brilliant failures. He also worked closely with the co-founders on special projects including running Google’s corporate strategy and goal setting process: OKRs. As the company scaled from private to public, Manish held several other strategic roles and spent significant time overseas as Google established its global presence. After Google, Manish joined Highland Capital and helped expand the firm’s offices in California. Manish is certainly the “accidental” venture capitalist but grew to love the craft. He focuses on early stage investing. Manish was able to partner with a number of exceptional entrepreneurs over the years who have scaled their businesses to public companies and multi billion dollar acquisitions.
Manish's passion for building extends to many aspects of his life. He has taught in the Stanford School of Engineering for years as well as serving as a Fellow at the University of Toronto - CDL. He was also recognized as a Distinguished Fellow by IDEO CoLab. And when he can, he loves to find excuses to go to his local machine shop.
Manish has spent his career at the edge of innovation as an operator, inventor, and as a venture capitalist. He deeply believes in the idea that the best products, those that truly impact us, shift from being novel technologies to becoming commonplace, disappearing into our daily lives.
Kelsey Hightower is a renowned technology advocate and thought leader in the cloud-native computing space. With extensive experience in Kubernetes, Go, and cloud technologies, Kelsey has made significant contributions to the open-source community. As a frequent conference speaker and author, he shares his expertise, inspiring developers and organizations to embrace innovative solutions and build scalable, reliable systems.
Wes McKinney is a software entrepreneur focused on data tools. He created Python’s pandas project and co-created Apache Arrow. He wrote “Python for Data Analysis” and serves on the PMC for Apache Parquet. He is now the CTO of Voltron Data, which develops accelerated computing technologies powered by Apache Arrow.
Matt Klein is a software engineer at Lyft and the creator of Envoy. For over 20 years across a variety of companies, he has worked on increasing the power and simplifying the operation of operating systems, virtualization, distributed systems and networking. Some highlights include leading the development of Twitter’s L7 edge proxy and working on high-performance computing and networking in Amazon’s EC2.
Kutta is a technology industry veteran with over 20 years of experience building large-scale software products used by billions of people. He's currently building the future of infrastructure & platforms at LinkedIn while investing in & advising several successful startups across AI, Privacy, Consumer, EdTech, and other sectors. Previous to LinkedIn, he was the Principal Architect for the AI Infrastructure Services group at Facebook, where he designed & implemented Machine Learning systems used to enable AI at scale in every product at the company. Before that, he spent almost 15 years in the gaming industry at Valve & Microsoft building award-winning franchises such as Halo, Portal, Gears of War, Dota, and Counter-Strike.
Gokul Rajaram is an executive at DoorDash. He joined Doordash after DoorDash acquired Square’s food delivery business, Caviar. Prior to DoorDash, he worked as the Product Engineering Lead from July 2013 to October 2019 at Square, where he led several product development teams and served on Square’s executive team. Prior to Square, he served as Product Director of Ads from August 2010 to July 2013 at Facebook, where he helped Facebook transition its advertising business to become mobile-first. Earlier in his career, Gokul served as a Product Management Director for Google AdSense, where he helped launch the product and grow it into a substantial portion of Google’s business. Gokul has served as a Director of Coinbase (COIN), Pinterest(PINS), and The Trade Desk (TTD).
Harrison Miller is the Founder and Managing Partner of Unite & Renew, a political philanthropy working to create a more functional, productive, and unified US Congress.
Harrison was formerly a Senior Advisor and Managing Director at Summit Partners, a global growth equity firm with $40B under management. At Summit he served as Co-Head of Venture Capital and a member of the firm’s Executive Committee, while leading Summit’s investments in numerous leading technology companies. Prior to Summit, he was a member of Amazon.com’s early management team, leading the launch of Amazon’s first retail category beyond media, and the company’s first business selling its software infrastructure to enterprise customers as a managed service. Prior to Amazon, he led sales and marketing at Lightspan, an e-learning startup that went public in 2000; helped create and run micro-lending programs in the developing world with two NGOs; and was an elementary school teacher in New York City.
He holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and an AB in Religion from Princeton University.
