Addition to accelerate developer-first AI infrastructure
Berkeley, CA – March 13, 2025 — Arize, a leader in AI observability and LLM evaluation, today announced the acquisition of Velvet, a developer-first AI gateway startup.
Arize helps organizations ensure AI systems work reliably in production through advanced testing, model monitoring, evaluation frameworks, and debugging tools. The platform supports AI agents, voice assistants, and other sophisticated gen-AI applications as well as traditional ML. Velvet provides developers with lightweight tooling to analyze, evaluate, and monitor AI features.
“We’re thrilled to welcome the Velvet team and work toward a shared vision around AI observability,” said Jason Lopatecki, CEO and Co-Founder of Arize AI.
The Velvet team will focus on developer experience initiatives, helping to accelerate adoption of Arize’s unified AI platform, spanning:
- Arize AX for Enterprise – AI evaluation and observability platform
- Arize Phoenix OSS – Open-source AI observability with 2M+ monthly downloads
- Arize AI Copilot – An AI-powered agent that helps engineers debug, optimize, and analyze models faster with 30+ skills.
“Joining Arize lets us bring sophisticated AI infrastructure to more full-stack product developers,” said Emma Lawler, former CEO of Velvet. “Our shared vision is to make AI observability accessible while maintaining the enterprise-grade capabilities teams need as they scale.”
Chris Hendel, Velvet’s co-founder and CTO, will lead platform engineering initiatives at Arize. Velvet’s existing customers will have the option to transition to Arize’s platform.
The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
About Arize
Arize AI is a unified AI observability and LLM evaluation platform that helps teams develop and maintain more successful AI. Arize’s automated monitoring and observability platform allows teams to quickly detect issues when they emerge, troubleshoot why they happened, and improve overall performance across both traditional ML and generative use cases. Arize is headquartered in Berkeley, CA.
About Velvet
Velvet provides an AI gateway to help developers analyze, evaluate, and monitor AI features in production. The product enables teams to seamlessly observe LLM requests, analyze performance, and continuously test AI features with minimal setup overhead.