We’re excited to share more on our investment in Jozu.
Jozu is an MLOps platform designed to streamline the development, deployment, and security of AI models, agents, and applications across teams and environments. It offers a comprehensive suite of tools that integrate seamlessly with existing DevOps workflows. Its key open-source tool, KitOps, packages AI/ML models, datasets, code, and configurations into reproducible artifacts known as ModelKits. Jozu’s mission is to provide security-conscious organizations with AI/ML lifecycle tooling that accelerates projects from development to production—without compromising compliance, security, or operational agility.
Jozu is tackling one of the most complex and underdeveloped areas of the enterprise AI stack: enabling teams to securely deploy, monitor, and manage composite AI/ML applications in production. Their platform helps organizations maintain environment standards, ensure compliance and reporting, and accelerate time to production.
Highlights
- Founded: 2023
- HQ: Toronto
- Funding: February 2025 | $4M Seed Financing
- Investors: Led by HalfCourt Capital, with participation from Brightspark Ventures, Mozilla Ventures, AlleyCorp, Sentiero, and Union Bay Partners.
The Story So Far
AI is evolving quickly, but the tools required to manage AI and ML in production have not kept pace. Most large organizations are still in exploration mode, running multiple POCs with different AI providers, and very few AI or ML projects are successfully deployed in production. Existing MLOps tools are focused on data science and model development, while DevOps tools are often poorly suited to the size, complexity, and non-deterministic nature of AI systems.
Jozu was created specifically for DevOps and SRE teams who need to securely deploy, monitor, and manage composite and agentic AI and ML applications in production environments. The platform provides a pluggable framework that accelerates safe DevOps for AI by establishing a golden path through the software development lifecycle. It brings consistency across environments and teams, making it easier for enterprises to operationalize a portfolio of AI and ML projects using a shared set of tools, workflows, and standards.
As part of its strategy to define and lead this emerging market, Jozu launched KitOps in 2024. The team built KitOps as an open source foundation, which is now a CNCF project with close to 200K downloads.
Our Thesis
We invested in Jozu because of the exceptional depth and complementary expertise of its founding team. Brad Micklea, Gorkem Ercan, and Jesse Williams bring together the exact combination of skills needed to succeed in the enterprise MLOps space—deep technical credibility, proven go-to-market execution, and a track record of building developer tools that scale.
The team is attacking a challenging software infrastructure problem at a pivotal moment in AI’s enterprise adoption curve. Rapidly, Jozu went to market with KitOps as an open source project which has gained impressive traction since - which got our attention!
Why this team stood out:
Proven enterprise DevOps expertise: Brad previously co-founded Codenvy (acquired by Red Hat) and served as GM of Amazon API Gateway, bringing 25+ years of experience building developer tools that have achieved market leadership. Gorkem served as a Distinguished Engineer at Red Hat and created widely-adopted open source projects, including the Eclipse JDT Language Server and vscode-java extension, demonstrating his ability to build tools that developers actually use at scale.
Product-market fit through open source validation: The team built KitOps as an open source foundation, which is now a CNCF project downloaded thousands of times weekly and used in production by global enterprises and government agencies. This validates both the technical approach and market need before scaling the commercial product.
Go-to-market excellence: Jesse brings deep devops GTM experience with previous marketing and growth roles at AWS, Docker, and Red Hat. We were impressed by his ability to position complex developer tools and build engaged communities. His expertise in developer marketing and messaging complements the technical depth of Brad and Gorkem.
Addressing a critical enterprise gap: The team identified that existing MLOps tools built for data scientists lack the security, governance, and compliance features enterprises need—a gap they're uniquely positioned to fill given their combined backgrounds in enterprise DevOps, security, and developer tools.
The investment
Jozu has raised a C$4 million dollar seed round led by HalfCourt Capital, with participation from Mozilla Ventures, AlleyCorp, Sentiero, Union Bay Partners and Brightspark Ventures.
This round will help build and scale Jozu’s enterprise-grade orchestration tools for AI applications.
To learn more about Jozu, visit their website.
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