Acquisition gives enterprise teams a governed path from AI experimentation to production without disrupting existing workflows or infrastructure
AUSTIN, Texas — April 29, 2026 — Anaconda Inc., the trusted foundation for AI-native development, today announced the acquisition of Outerbounds, the company behind Metaflow, the open source AI/ML orchestration framework trusted by some of the world’s most sophisticated engineering organizations, including Realtor.com, GE HealthCare, and Warner Brothers. The acquisition marks a significant step in Anaconda’s evolution from the world’s most trusted foundation for developing enterprise AI, to the first unified platform spanning the entire AI-native development software lifecycle.
AI is redefining how software is built. AI-native applications are fundamentally different from traditional software: the AI model becomes the core, and everything else built around it is secondary. The result is a new class of software that is nondeterministic, agent-driven, and exponentially more complex. Human developers are still directing this work, setting intent, reviewing output, and making architectural decisions, but the volume of code flowing through enterprise pipelines has expanded far beyond what any team could manually verify. AI-created code now accounts for nearly half of all new code, but produces 1.7x more defects than human-written code, and 80% of dependencies recommended by AI coding assistants carry known risks. The bottleneck is no longer writing code, but managing everything that code depends on, across distributed infrastructure, with reproducible, secure, and consistent results.
With more than 50 million users and 21 billion downloads, Anaconda has long been the starting point for compound AI systems and data science work. Complete with secure packages, verified dependencies, trusted environments, reproducible builds, and curated open source AI models, that foundation now extends all the way to production. With the acquisition of Outerbounds, Anaconda customers benefit from the only end-to-end enterprise AI stack where trusted distribution and environments, governed AI model deployment, and production-grade agentic workflows live under one roof.
Outerbounds was purpose-built to give data scientists and AI/ML engineers enterprise-ready workflow orchestration that is the building block for compound AI systems. It was critical that it works across any infrastructure they choose, complementing the tools and cloud relationships teams already have. Built on Metaflow, which originated at Netflix to handle some of the world’s most demanding AI/ML workloads, Outerbounds provides end-to-end orchestration, experiment tracking, artifact management, and scalable compute across cloud, data platforms, and hybrid environments providing access to the latest GPUs.
That cloud-agnostic, bring-your-own-infrastructure model mirrors how Anaconda has always operated: meeting teams where they are, working within their existing environments, and never requiring lock-in for secure, enterprise-grade capabilities.
The new combined platform is built for the realities enterprises face today: always-on systems where human teams and AI agents must move fast together without sacrificing security or governance. By bringing together workflow orchestration, compute management, experiment tracking, and enterprise governance into a single platform, Anaconda provides AI agents the secure foundation they need to succeed. Organizations now have a trusted layer to build, iterate, and operate enterprise-grade AI systems at scale, all within their own environments, under their own controls, while allowing data scientists and engineers to continue working in their existing tools and workflows.
“For years, Anaconda has served as the trusted foundation for AI and data science within development, and this acquisition is the natural next chapter,” said David DeSanto, CEO of Anaconda. “The future belongs to AI-native development, where the AI model is the core of how applications are built, not something bolted on at the end. The problem enterprises face today is that delivering on that vision requires stitching together tools, platforms, and governance components that were never designed to work as one, nor to even work with AI. Until now, no other platform has spanned the entire AI-native development lifecycle. For the first time, with Anaconda and Outerbounds, enterprises can securely scale complex, compound AI systems from idea all the way to production on the infrastructure they already trust.”
“Joining Anaconda is the moment Outerbounds has been building toward,” said Ville Tuulos, co-founder and CEO of Outerbounds. “Anaconda has spent more than a decade earning the trust of the world’s largest enterprises, and that trust is exactly the foundation our customers need to take AI systems all the way to production with confidence. What makes this combination so powerful is a shared commitment to Python, reproducibility, and software engineering best practices. Together, we can give data scientists and AI engineers everything they need to move from secure environments to production-grade orchestration, and turn AI innovation into real, measurable outcomes.”
Anaconda is committed to the continued development and support of Metaflow as an open-source project. Metaflow’s vibrant community and its role as a leading framework for data science and AI/ML workflows are central to what makes this acquisition so compelling. Anaconda engineers will continue contributing to Metaflow alongside the Anaconda Platform, consistent with the open-source stewardship model Anaconda has long championed across data science and AI ecosystems.
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