Lukas Biewald

Lukas Biewald is co-founder of Weights & Biases, the MLOps and experiment-tracking company he started in 2017 with Chris Van Pelt and Shawn Lewis. He previously founded CrowdFlower (later Figure Eight), which Appen acquired in 2019. CoreWeave acquired Weights & Biases in 2025.

Stanford, Yahoo, and Powerset

Born in Boston in 1981, Biewald earned bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science at Stanford. He worked on machine translation and search relevance at Yahoo, including leading search relevance for Yahoo Japan, then joined Powerset as a senior scientist before Microsoft acquired that company. He has co-authored dozens of AI research papers spanning crowdsourcing evaluation and applied ML.

CrowdFlower to Figure Eight

In 2007 he co-founded CrowdFlower with Van Pelt to organize human labeling for machine learning. The company later became Figure Eight and was acquired by Appen for up to $300M. That chapter made him a familiar voice on human-in-the-loop data and quality control for training sets.

Weights & Biases and Gradient Dissent

Weights & Biases grew from tools for tracking experiments into a broader platform for model management and LLM app development, adopted by large AI labs and enterprises. Biewald hosts the Gradient Dissent podcast, interviewing builders across MLOps, robotics, and foundation-model companies. After the CoreWeave acquisition he remains one of the clearest public founders associated with the ML developer-tools category.