Ben Firshman

Ben Firshman is co-founder and CEO of Replicate, which runs machine learning models in the cloud. He started it with Andreas Jansson, and Replicate joined Cloudflare in late 2025, according to the Cloudflare blog.

Handing Fig Over to Docker

Firshman and Aanand Prasad built Fig at Orchard Laboratories, a UK startup that Docker bought in 2014, according to InformationWeek. Fig became docker-compose, the standard way to define services from containerized applications, according to Latent Space.

Packaging Machine Learning Like Software

Jansson and Firshman did not understand why AI models could not be shipped as software ready for production, Sequoia wrote, a question tied to Firshman's work at Docker. "If only we could define a standard box for machine learning models," they reasoned. Their first tool, Cog, was in Latent Space's words a Fig-equivalent for machine learning workloads.