Enrique Ferrao
| Enrique Ferrao | |
| Occupation | Co-founder and CTO of Pipeshift |
|---|---|
| Known for | Pipeshift (YC S24) |
Enrique Ferrao is a technology entrepreneur and the co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO) of Pipeshift, an AI infrastructure company that provides inference and orchestration tools for deploying open-source AI models in production. Pipeshift was part of the Y Combinator Summer 2024 batch.[1] Ferrao was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.[2]
Career
Ferrao co-founded Pipeshift alongside Arko C. Prior to Pipeshift, Ferrao had experience scaling large language models (LLMs) to thousands of users at a previous startup.[3] His technical expertise includes large language models, system architecture, and DevOps.
Pipeshift operates as a modular orchestration platform designed to help engineering teams run real-time AI inference in production environments. The platform offers optimized runtimes that enable teams to meet specific latency and throughput service-level agreements (SLAs), combined with infrastructure orchestration that auto-scales and routes workloads across clusters and regions.[4] The company supports open-source, custom, and fine-tuned AI models across various components including embeddings, vector databases, LLMs, vision models, and audio models, and can deploy across multiple cloud providers or on-premises infrastructure.
In January 2025, Pipeshift raised $2.5 million in seed funding from investors including Y Combinator. The company stated that the funds would be used to enhance its product offerings and expand its market reach. At the time of the funding announcement, Pipeshift had offices in San Francisco and Bengaluru.[5] The company reported that its platform makes AI model deployment up to 30 times more efficient compared to conventional approaches.[6]
Ferrao has spoken publicly about the complexities of deploying open-source AI at scale. In an April 2025 appearance on the MLOps community's Agent Hour, he discussed challenges teams face when updating fine-tuned models, switching between inference engines, and deploying across different GPU hardware such as the Nvidia A100, L40s, H100, and Intel Gaudi 2.
References
- ↑ "Pipeshift – Y Combinator". 'Y Combinator}'. Retrieved 2026-03-18.
- ↑ "Enrique Ferrao – Forbes Councils". 'Forbes}'. Retrieved 2026-03-18.
- ↑ "The hidden complexities of open-source AI // Enrique Ferrao // Agent Hour". 'MLOps.community}'. Retrieved 2026-03-18.
- ↑ "Pipeshift". 'Pipeshift}'. Retrieved 2026-03-18.
- ↑ "AI infrastructure startup Pipeshift raises $2.5 million from Y Combinator, others". 'The Economic Times}'. Retrieved 2026-03-18.
- ↑ "Pipeshift raises $2.5M to offer enterprises flexibility and control over their AI stack using open-source models". 'GlobeNewswire}'. Retrieved 2026-03-18.