Anaconda, which provides an AI-native dev platform, is acquiring Outerbounds, the company behind Metaflow, an open source AI/ML orchestration framework that originated at Netflix, the companies announced on Tuesday.
The deal aims to provide enterprise teams with a governed path from AI experimentation to production. This also makes Anaconda a full-stack platform for AI-native development, the company says.
In addition, this move signals a broader inflection point in how enterprise software is built. AI-generated code now accounts for nearly half of all new code in enterprise pipelines, Anaconda indicates based on analysis. Yet that code produces 1.7 times as many defects as human-written code, and 80% of dependencies recommended by AI coding assistants pose known security risks, the company says.
“Agents are introducing 1.7x more bugs into the software.”
Anaconda CEO David DeSanto tells The New Stack, “There are a lot of organizations saying to us: we have to trade off between the velocity of an agent and the quality of a human.”
“Agents are introducing 1.7x more bugs into the software, which means humans are trying to fix that, which means they’re almost not getting the value of leveraging the agent to start with,” DeSanto says.
The bottleneck is somewhere else, now
The bottleneck in the AI era is no longer writing code. It’s governing everything that code depends on — at scale, across distributed infrastructure, with reproducibility and security baked in, DeSanto says.
That’s the gap Anaconda is trying to close.
“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,” he says in a press release. “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.”
Moreover, “We don’t want to just be for data scientists,” DeSanto says in the press release. “Data scientists are becoming AI engineers now. Software developers are being asked to write code that works with AI models. Realistically, everyone’s becoming that AI developer.”
Netflix DNA, enterprise scale
Metaflow has earned credibility in demanding environments. Built originally inside Netflix to handle production-scale AI/ML workloads, it is now used by organizations including Realtor.com, GE HealthCare, and Warner Bros.
Outerbounds has transformed Metaflow into a full-scale enterprise platform. According to CEO and Co-founder Ville Tuulos — who previously led AI/ML at Netflix — the platform handles everything from orchestration to compute scaling across any environment, all without locking customers into a single cloud provider.
“Netflix has this cultural value of freedom and responsibility. It’s very useful to have enough freedom to choose the best tool for the job,” he continues. “But there’s a big responsibility aspect that oftentimes gets forgotten in this AI mania.”
“There’s a big responsibility aspect that oftentimes gets forgotten in this AI mania.”
Anaconda’s cloud-agnostic stance mirrors the company’s own positioning. With more than 50 million users and 21 billion downloads, Anaconda has long been the default starting point for Python-based data science and AI work, providing secure packages, verified dependencies, and reproducible builds, the company says.
Secure by default, not by bolt-on
The platform is secure by default, the companies say.
“Our platform always deploys in the customer’s own environment, which is actually somewhat different from any other SaaS services,” Tuulos tells The New Stack. “For all of our customers, everything runs securely in their own cloud or on-prem. Doing that is much harder — but there’s a lot of value in it.”
This acquisition extends that trusted foundation all the way through to production orchestration — a gap that has historically forced teams to stitch together disparate tools.
For Tuulos, the fit comes down to shared engineering values. “What makes this combination so powerful is a shared commitment to Python, reproducibility, and software engineering best practices,” Tuulos says in a statement. “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.”
When the model is the core
The acquisition also reflects how AI-native development differs structurally from traditional software engineering, the companies say. In AI-native applications, the model is the core — not a feature layer built on top of conventional code. The surrounding software exists to serve the model: feeding it data, routing its outputs, managing its dependencies, and verifying that everything it touches is secure and reproducible.
“AI agents are providing the code, but this idea of providing the outer bounds.”
“The entity producing the code in the middle is not a data scientist anymore — increasingly it’s AI agents,” Tuulos tells The New Stack. “So, the AI agents are providing the code, but this idea of providing the outer bounds, those boundaries in an enterprise environment within which you can run this code with confidence — that is more relevant than ever.” This also explains the company’s name.
Human developers are still in the loop, setting intent and making architectural decisions, but the volume and complexity of what flows through enterprise pipelines has outpaced manual oversight.
One stack, your infrastructure
Anaconda says the combined platform directly addresses workflow orchestration, compute management, experiment tracking, and enterprise governance in a single stack, running on infrastructure that organizations already own and control.
Anaconda also says it will continue supporting Metaflow as an open source project, with engineers contributing to the framework alongside the commercial platform. This is consistent with the open source stewardship posture Anaconda has maintained across the data science and AI ecosystem.
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