Announcing Marimo Inc.

TL;DR. My co-founder Myles and I have started a company, Marimo Inc., to continue building marimo — an open-source Python notebook that’s reproducible, Git-friendly, deployable as a web app, and executable as a script. Long-term, our company is on a mission to build the world’s best platform for working with data.

To fund our development, we’ve raised a $5M seed round led by Anthony Goldbloom (ex-Kaggle, Sumble) and Shyam Mani of AIX Ventures, with participation from Jeff Dean (Google), Clement Delangue (HuggingFace), Ben Hamner (ex-Kaggle, Sumble), Jordan Tigani (MotherDuck), Charlie Marsh (Astral), Paige Bailey (Google), Lukas Biewald (Weights and Biases), Wes McKinney (Posit, Composed Ventures), and Shane Barratt.

When I started working on marimo, I had just finished a PhD at Stanford where I helped grow an open-source library for optimization to a million monthly downloads, and before that worked on TensorFlow at Google Brain. Jupyter notebooks were essential to my work, because they let me see my data while I worked on it — but they were also extremely frustrating. Hidden state led to hidden bugs (over a third of the 10 million Jupyter notebooks on GitHub fail to reproduce), the JSON file format made them hard to use in Python codebases, and the final documents lacked interactivity. While Jupyter notebooks are widely used for AI/ML development, STEM, and data engineering, now more than ever, there’s growing consensus that this kind of work shouldn’t be done in error-prone scratchpads.

With marimo, Myles (Palantir, CloudKitchens) and I set out to create a programming environment that blended the best parts of interactive computing with the rigor of traditional software development. Unlike Jupyter, marimo notebooks are reproducible, stored as pure Python, versionable with Git, deployable as web apps, and executable as scripts.

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