Who we are#

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Chroma as a project is coordinated by a small team of full-time employees who work at a company also called Chroma.

We work in the sunny Mission District in San Francisco.

Chroma is co-founded by Jeff Huber (left) and Anton Troynikov (right).

Our commitment to open source#

Chroma is a company that builds the open-source project also called Chroma.

We are committed to building open source software because we believe in the flourishing of humanity that will be unlocked through the democratization of robust, safe, and aligned AI systems. These tools need to be available to a new developer just starting in ML as well as the organizations that scale ML to millions (and billions) of users. Open source is about expanding the horizon of what’s possible.

Chroma is a commercial open source company. What does that mean? We believe that organizing financially sustainable teams of people to work to manage, push and integrate the project enriches the health of the project and the community.

It is important that our values around this are very clear!

• We are committed to building Chroma as a ubiquitous open source standard
• A successful Chroma-based commercial product is essential for the success of the technology, and is a win-win for everyone. Simply put, many organizations will not adopt Chroma without the option of a commercially hosted solution; and the project must be backed by a company with a viable business model. We want to build an awesome project and an awesome business.
• We will decide what we provide exclusively in the commercial product based on clear, consistent criteria.

What code will be open source? As a general rule, any feature which an individual developer would find useful will be 100% open source forever. This approach, popularized by Gitlab, is called buyer-based open source. We believe that this is essential to accomplishing our mission.

Currently we don’t have any specific plans to monetize Chroma, we are working on a hosted service that will be launched as a free technical preview to make it easier for developers to get going. We are 100% focused on building valuable open source software with the community and for the community.

Our investors#

Chroma raised an $18M seed round led by Astasia Myers from Quiet Capital. Joining the round are angels including Naval Ravikant, Max and Jack Altman, Jordan Tigani (Motherduck), Guillermo Rauch (Vercel), Akshay Kothari (Notion), Amjad Masad (Replit), Spencer Kimball (CockroachDB), and other founders and leaders from ScienceIO, Gumroad, MongoDB, Scale, Hugging Face, Jasper and more.

Chroma raised a pre-seed in May 2022, led by Anthony Goldbloom (Kaggle) from AIX Ventures, James Cham from Bloomberg Beta, and Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross (AI Grant).

We're excited to work with a deep set of investors and enterpreneurs who have invested in and built some of the most successful open-source projects in the world.