Huber spent years taking machine learning from demo to production at Standard Cyborg, and he now runs Chroma, the open-source database many developers use to give AI apps search over their own data.
Jeff Huber is co-founder and CEO of Chroma, a San Francisco, California, company that makes an open-source database AI apps use to store and search their data, plus a hosted cloud version.
Returning to the Bay Area for Startups
Born on the San Francisco Peninsula, he grew up in North Carolina and moved back to the Bay Area in about 2012 to work at early-stage startups, he told Madrona.
His previous company, Standard Cyborg, used the raw depth data from iPhone cameras to build 3D scans of people and objects. The team built and open-sourced a mapping pipeline on that data and worked with companies on uses such as virtual helmet fitting. The hardest part, he has said, was taking machine learning that worked in a demo and making it reliable in production.
Starting Chroma with Anton Troynikov
He met Anton Troynikov in 2018, when Troynikov emailed computer vision and robotics founders from recent Y Combinator batches after moving back to the US, according to Business Insider. The two later started Chroma, first aimed at machine learning engineers training and deploying models. When ChatGPT arrived they turned toward developers building apps on large language models, who needed a simple way to give those models their own data through embeddings, the numeric representations AI models use for text and images.
