Vertical beats horizontal in machine learning -- Zetta Venture Partners

The best products in the world are made by vertically integrated businesses: Apple's hardware to software; Amazon's warehouses to websites; and Carnegie's mines to mills [1]. Zetta is completely focused on investing in data and machine learning startups. We see lots of horizontal platforms and APIs that anyone can use to add some machine learning models to their application. However, machine learning has advanced to the point where customers expect better than commodity performance. We like to see startups vertically integrating their technical skills with the skills of domain experts and unique data acquisition to build applications with the level of accuracy required in commercial and industrial settings.