Conductor Technologies

The story begins inside the visual effects studio Atomic Fiction, known for its work on films like “Deadpool” and “Game of Thrones”. Founders Kevin Baillie and Ryan Tudhope wanted to avoid the massive upfront cost and overhead of building a traditional, on-premises server farm for rendering complex graphics. They initially tried off-the-shelf solutions to use the cloud but hit limitations, so they decided to build their own tool. This internal project was the prototype for Conductor. The platform they built was designed by artists, for artists, to make tapping into massive-scale cloud computing resources simple. It acts as a smart dispatcher, sending rendering jobs to public clouds like AWS and Google Cloud Platform, and later, to specialized clouds. The goal was to eliminate the complexity of managing virtual machines and storage, allowing studios to pay for only the computation time they used, down to the minute. In 2017, the platform was launched commercially as Conductor Technologies. Mac Moore, who had a background at Autodesk, joined to lead the business, eventually becoming CEO. The company's major turning point came in January 2023, when it was acquired by CoreWeave, a specialized cloud provider focused on large-scale GPU workloads. The acquisition integrated Conductor's user-friendly software with CoreWeave's powerful, purpose-built infrastructure, giving studios access to a broader range of high-end NVIDIA GPUs. Mac Moore transitioned to lead the Media and Entertainment division at CoreWeave, continuing the mission to streamline cloud rendering for the creative industry.