OpenAI to acquire AI training tracker Neptune

OpenAI has agreed to acquire a startup specializing in tools for tracking AI training, Neptune, which promptly announced it is withdrawing its products from the market.

OpenAI said in a statement.

The ChatGPT maker has been a Neptune customer for more than a year.

Experiment tracking tools such as Neptune’s enable data science teams to monitor AI model training runs, compare results across different configurations, and identify issues during the development process. Neptune’s platform tracked metrics including loss curves, gradient statistics, and activation patterns across thousands of concurrent experiments.

Following Neptune’s withdrawal from the market, users of its SaaS version have a few months’ grace to export their data and migrate to alternative platforms during which the company will continue to provide stability and security fixes, but will add no new features, it said. “On March 4, 2026, at 10 am PST: The hosted app and API will be turned off. Any remaining hosted data will be securely and irreversibly deleted as part of the shutdown,” Neptune said on its transition hub web page.

Self-hosted customers will have been contacted by their account manager, it said.

Consolidation concerns

The move raised concerns among industry analysts about vendor consolidation in AI development tools. “Testing, experiment tracking tooling, etc., should not be linked or aligned to any vendor of tech including AI,” said Faisal Kawoosa, chief analyst at Techarc. “These should always remain third party and there should be no bias influencing the independent and neutral results of such platforms.”

Kawoosa said consolidation of tooling infrastructure is premature as the industry has yet to determine a definite course for AI development. “I think it’s too early for consolidation of tooling infrastructure as we are yet to see a definite course of AI,” he said.

However, Anshel Sag, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy saw it as a natural progression in an industry that is becoming more mature.

“This very much looks like a choice OpenAI has made to ensure its favorite tools are always available for it to use,” Sag said.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Neptune provides software that tracks training metrics, surfaces issues during model development, and stores historical data from previous experiments. The platform allows organizations to compare training runs across different model architectures and monitor thousands of experiments simultaneously.

The company is focused on helping teams build models during “the iterative, messy, and unpredictable phase of model training,” Neptune CEO Piotr Niedźwiedź wrote in a blog post announcing the deal.

Migration options for affected customers

Neptune isn’t the only company offering such tools, said Sag, noting that Weights and Biases, Tensorboard and MLFlow are also active in this market.

Indeed, Neptune provided instructions for exporting its data and migrating to MLFlow or Weights and Biases.

Weights & Biases offers a managed platform with visualization and collaboration features. MLflow, an open-source platform from Databricks, handles experiment tracking as part of end-to-end ML lifecycle management.

Another option is Comet, which provides experiment tracking with deployment monitoring capabilities.

Cloud providers also offer experiment tracking through their platforms. Google’s Vertex AI includes tracking capabilities for teams using Google Cloud, while AWS SageMaker and Azure Machine Learning provide similar features within their respective ecosystems.