Yep! We were working on an authentication startup (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30615352) and built it to $1.5M in ARR, but then we saw even a bigger pain point; local AI is hard. When we tried building a corporate knowledge base with RAG and local models, we hit the same wall: a painful gap between prototype and production.
Production-ready enterprise AI requires solving model management, RAG pipelines, model fine-tuning, prompt engineering, failover, cost optimization, and deployment orchestration. You can’t just be good at one or two of these, you have to be great at all of them or your project won't succeed. And so Llamafarm was born!
Monetization-wise - We’re open source and free forever, with revenue coming from enterprise support, managed deployments, and compliance packages—basically, companies pay for confidence, not code.
We still are Rownd (https://rownd.com); but we see the writing on the wall. SaaS Software that helps with "hard code" problems is going the way of the dodo.
What used to take a few weeks and was hard to maintain can be down with Codex in the background. We are still bringing in decent revenue and have no plans to sunset, we are just not investing in it.
We all have IBM backgrounds - not sexy, but we are good at running complex software in customer datacenters and in their clouds. AI is going to have to run locally to extract full value from regulated industries.
We are using a services + support model, likely going vertical (legal, healthcare, and we had some good momentum in the US Gov until 1 October :)).
