Spell

Spell was a developer of a digital machine learning platform. The platform is intended to streamline machine learning and deep learning projects, offering infrastructure management services to provide code management, data efficiency, and a hybrid cloud network for the operationalization of AI for NLP, computer vision, and speech recognition. The company was founded in 2017 by Serkan Piantino and is headquartered in New York City.

Spell's platform was developed to operationalize AI for natural language processing, machine vision, and speech recognition and was launched as a cloud-agnostic, end-to-end MLOps platform for deep learning workflows. The platform automated the same workflow, with automation covering development, training, deploying, and optimizing models at scale. Spell's platform was designed to address user needs through managed and automated orchestration, documentation, optimization, deployment, and monitoring of deep learning models through the lifecycle of the model.

To achieve this, the platform captured and tracked information about every part of the model lifecycle, including the data, parameters, experiments, personnel, compute resources, infrastructure, and deployment location. These are also capable of being used to ensure accountability, collaboration, productivity, reproducibility, explainability, and governance.

In June 2022, Reddit announced its purchase of Spell. Reddit previously used machine learning for personalized recommendations on the company's platform through the Discover Tab, which the app introduced earlier in 2022. Reddit also used machine learning for safety work and targeted advertising on the platform. As part of the acquisition, Spell closed access to new commercial customers with some of the company's team moving over to Reddit to work on machine learning projects to determine how Reddit customizes ad placements, defines contextual relevance, and keeps Reddit communities safe. Included in that movement, Spell founder and CEO Serkan Piantino joined Reddit as the vice president of foundational product.