Peltarion

» see peltarion.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Peltarion was founded in Stockholm in 2004 by Luka Crnkovic-Friis and Måns Erlandsson, and for its first dozen years it was a consultancy. If you were NASA or General Electric and you suspected a neural network could solve your problem, Peltarion was one of a small number of firms you could actually phone about it. That was years before anyone put the phrase deep learning in a press release.

The product arrived in May 2006 and it was called Synapse. It was a component-based development environment for neural networks, written for Windows on top of .NET, and it worked something like an audio patchbay: you dragged components onto a canvas and linked them so a signal flowed down the chain, and the chain was the network. Weight layers and self-organizing maps were components you wired in, the same as a Fourier transform filter or a plot.

Eighteen years after the founding, in June 2022, King bought the company. King makes Candy Crush. The press release went out on 13 June, the platform was switched off on 30 September, and the two founders turned up on King's org chart as vice presidents and heads of AI and machine learning.

~ the case file ~

~ the deployment button ~

The part of Synapse that is hardest to look away from is the deployment component. You trained your system in the IDE, then pressed deploy, and it stripped the trained model down to the minimum it needed to execute and compiled that into a single .NET assembly. The assembly would run under the .NET Compact Framework, which in 2006 meant you could drop a trained neural network onto an embedded device.

I work on computer vision for small flying hardware now, in Ankara, and getting a trained model off the training machine and onto the thing that actually flies is still most of the job. Peltarion sold a button for that in 2006, on a per-seat license, to industrial customers who were never going to write their own toolchain. The documentation shipped a C# example where you read a sensor, ran the net, and set the power on a motor.

~ the pivot ~

Synapse has no announced ending and the archive is what brackets it. The product page at peltarion.com was still serving on 17 July 2015 and returned a 404 by 4 March 2016, and the homepage quadrupled in size over the same months. That window is the company deciding it was no longer a desktop software vendor.

What came out the other side was the Peltarion Platform, a browser-based deep learning service aimed at people who had the data and the problem but not a research team. It raised $20 million in February 2019, opened a London office, and got written up for letting doctors segment tumors and farmers forecast yields. Forbes noted in July 2018 that engineers from Spotify and from King had been flocking to this Swedish startup.

~ bought for the staff ~

Four years after that Forbes piece, King bought the whole thing and gave the platform's paying customers until the end of September to move. The technology went into mobile game development and live operations, which is a real engineering problem and not a small one, but it is a long way from the cancer imaging in the sales deck.

You can watch the handover happen in the archive's own index. On 20 October 2022, three weeks after the platform went dark, the crawler collected a 28 KB file off peltarion.com named KingBrand_masterLogo_400X274.png. The domain had stopped being a product and become a page about who owned it.

A migration page put up by a competitor is the only public document that states the shutdown date plainly, which is how a lot of enterprise software dies: not with an obituary, with somebody else's landing page telling your customers to hurry.

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