Who are Weights & Biases's decision-makers?
Weights & Biases is led by its three co-founders — Lukas Biewald (General Manager), Chris Van Pelt, and Shawn Lewis (both Distinguished Engineers) — alongside a VP/C-level team covering revenue, product, and engineering. Post-CoreWeave acquisition in May 2025, the founders maintain operational autonomy over the W&B business unit while operating within CoreWeave's corporate structure.
- General Manager
- Lukas Biewald (Co-Founder)
- Distinguished Engineers
- Chris Van Pelt & Shawn Lewis (Co-Founders)
- CRO & CMO
- Robin Bordoli
- Founded
- 2017
- Employees
- ~300–311
- Prior Exit
- CrowdFlower (co-founded by Biewald & Van Pelt, acquired by Figure Eight / Appen)
- Lukas BiewaldGeneral Manager & Co-Founder (formerly CEO)2017–presentPreviously co-founded CrowdFlower (acquired by Figure Eight / Appen); Stanford CS graduate who led W&B from founding to a $1.7B exit. Continues to run W&B as a CoreWeave business unit.
- Chris Van PeltDistinguished Engineer & Co-Founder2017–presentPreviously co-founded CrowdFlower with Biewald; deep ML systems background, leads technical architecture and platform strategy.
- Shawn LewisDistinguished Engineer & Co-Founder2017–presentFormer Google software engineer and founder of Beep Networks; de facto CTO during early years, now focused on core platform engineering.
- Robin BordoliCRO & CMO2021–presentHolds dual CRO/CMO role — a signal of the tight PLG coupling between marketing and revenue. Previously CRO/CMO at NextRoll, CEO at Figure Eight, and has IPO experience from Marketo and Jive.
- Phil GurbackiVP of Product2022–presentLeads the product roadmap across W&B Models, Weave, and the broader platform strategy, including the CoreWeave integration roadmap.
- Mike SaparovSVP of Technology2022–presentOversees the core engineering organization and platform reliability at the scale of 10B+ API calls per day.
Who leads Weights & Biases, and what's their background?
Lukas Biewald serves as General Manager of W&B within CoreWeave — effectively continuing as the business unit CEO post-acquisition. Biewald co-founded W&B after previously co-founding CrowdFlower (a data labeling marketplace later renamed Figure Eight and acquired by Appen), and before that worked as an engineer at Yahoo on machine translation. He holds a Bachelor's and Master's in Computer Science from Stanford, and is widely regarded as one of the earliest advocates for ML reproducibility infrastructure.
Chris Van Pelt and Shawn Lewis hold the title of Distinguished Engineer. Van Pelt co-founded CrowdFlower alongside Biewald and brings deep ML systems and data pipeline expertise, leading W&B's technical architecture evolution. Lewis was previously a software engineer at Google and founder of Beep Networks; he served as the de facto CTO during W&B's formative years and continues to lead core platform engineering.
The VP and C-level layer handles operational execution: Robin Bordoli is CRO & CMO, a dual role that signals the tight coupling between developer marketing and revenue in a PLG business. Bordoli previously served as CEO of NextRoll and has IPO experience from Marketo and Jive. Phil Gurbacki (VP of Product) leads the roadmap across W&B Models, Weave, and platform strategy. Mike Saparov (SVP of Technology) oversees the engineering organization and platform reliability at the scale of 10 billion+ API calls per day.
Who actually makes buying decisions at Weights & Biases?
W&B's internal buyers of technology mirror its PLG-to-enterprise motion: individual ML engineers and data scientists drive adoption bottom-up, while VP Engineering, VP of Product, or a dedicated MLOps/AI Platform team owns the formal procurement budget once a team commitment is established. At enterprises, the Chief AI Officer or Head of AI Research often sponsors the W&B renewal and cross-functional expansion.
For vendors selling into W&B, the buying committee shifts by category. Infrastructure and cloud spend flows through SVP Technology Mike Saparov and potentially CoreWeave's own central procurement. Developer tooling, IDE integrations, and framework partnerships are evaluated by the product and engineering teams — Phil Gurbacki's product organization is the key stakeholder for platform-level integrations. GTM tools (CRM, sales engagement, ABM) are owned by CRO Robin Bordoli and sales ops, making Bordoli the highest-leverage executive contact for revenue-stack vendors.
Post-CoreWeave acquisition, larger vendor contracts — particularly infrastructure-adjacent spending above six figures — may require sign-off at the CoreWeave parent level. This adds a procurement layer not present when W&B was independent, so vendors should map both the W&B and CoreWeave stakeholder trees for significant deal pursuits.
How is Weights & Biases organized, and what does the org look like?
W&B has operated as a remote-first company since founding, with the San Francisco headquarters serving as a coordination hub for leadership and key team meetings rather than a daily attendance office. Engineering is the largest function at roughly 120+ people — approximately 70% senior-level and 40% with advanced ML or AI degrees, consistent with a company whose core customer is itself a highly technical ML practitioner audience.
Post-CoreWeave acquisition, W&B functions as a semi-autonomous business unit. The co-founders retain product and operational control; CoreWeave provides infrastructure capacity (GPU compute, cloud distribution channels), public-company governance overhead, and balance sheet support. This structure gives W&B access to CoreWeave's enterprise relationships and capital while maintaining the development velocity of a focused product team with its own brand and roadmap.
The company's approximately 300–311 employees (as of 2025–2026) span more than 20 countries, with the highest concentration in North America followed by Europe and Asia-Pacific. The remote-first model allows W&B to hire senior ML engineers globally — a critical capability given that AI talent is distributed across research centers in the UK, France, Germany, Canada, and Asia that cannot easily relocate to San Francisco.
As of June 2026.Sources:About Weights & Biases — wandb.aiLukas Biewald — CrunchbaseRobin Bordoli — LinkedIn Pulse
Weights & Biases — frequently asked questions
