- H2O.ai, open source leader in AI and automatic machine learning for the enterprise, announced it raised $72.5 million in Series D
H2O.ai — an open source leader in artificial intelligence and automatic machine learning for the enterprise — announced it raised $72.5 million in Series D funding. Including this round, H2O.ai has raised a total of $147 million. This round of funding was led by Goldman Sachs and the Ping An Global Voyager Fund with continued investments from Wells Fargo, NVIDIA, and Nexus Venture Partners. Jade Mandel — the Vice President of the Principal Strategic Investments Group at Goldman Sachs — will be joining the H2O.ai Board of Directors in conjunction with the funding round.
Since the last round of funding, the automatic machine learning platform H2O Driverless AI has tripled H2O.ai’s customer base with expansion across every industry. Plus H2O.ai also grew its global footprint with AI Centers of Excellence in Prague and Chennai and added 10% of the world’s top data scientists Kaggle Grandmasters to the H2O.ai team.
H2O.ai’s customers include Aetna, Booking.com, Capital One, Comcast, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Franklin Templeton, Hitachi, MarketAxess, Nationwide Insurance, PwC, Tokio Marine, Wells Fargo, and Walgreens.
“H2O.ai is democratizing AI and powering the imagination of every entrepreneur and business globally – we are making them the true AI superpowers,” said H2O.ai CEO and founder Sri Satish Ambati. “Our customers are unlocking discovery in every sphere and walk of life and challenging the dominance of technology giants. This will be fun.”
With this round of funding, H2O.ai is planning to accelerate innovation and expand sales and marketing globally. And the funding round will be used to further simplify AI for business users with new and ground-breaking technologies.
“We’re thrilled to partner with the H2O.ai team on their mission to democratize artificial intelligence,” added Mandel. “Their deep technical bench and customer-centricity make them well-positioned to bring transparency and efficiency to the world of prediction.”
H2O.ai is going to continue to innovate to support AI4Good with a focus on wildlife and water conservation and investments in its highly successful academic program that makes the H2O.ai portfolio freely available to students, researchers and universities.
“We are keen on how the power of artificial intelligence enables insightful and personalized client experiences, and enhances our work with our clients,” explained Basil Darwish, the Managing Director of Strategic Investments at Wells Fargo. “H2O.ai’s focus on machine learning transparency and model interpretability facilitates adoption across our industry, and we are delighted to continue to invest in H2O.ai and to further deepen our partnership.”
Ever since H2O.ai was founded in 2012, the company has been on a mission to democratize AI for everyone. And to that end, H2O.ai leads a thriving open AI movement of hundreds of thousands of data scientists in tens of thousands of organizations globally.
“It’s clear that H2O.ai has solutions that have global relevance and appeal. Businesses around the world grapple with the challenge of applying machine learning in what are often resource-constrained situations. We’ve been deeply impressed with the combination of technical sophistication and ease of use present in all of H2O.ai’s offerings, and we look forward to helping expand the H2O.ai footprint in China and across Asia,” noted Donald Lacey — the Managing Director and COO of the Ping An Global Voyager Fund.
As H2O.ai receives continuous feedback from the community, H2O.ai innovates to deliver the best platform for delighting data scientists. And the company’s community and customer event called “H2O World New York” is going to be held on Oct. 22, 2019.
“We have been a big believer in H2O.ai since day one. We are ecstatic to see their success across the world with so many companies, in so many industries,” commented Jishnu Bhattacharjee — the Managing Director at Nexus Venture Partners. “AI in the enterprise is a reality that H2O.ai is driving. We are thrilled to continue backing Sri and team as they accelerate their growth trajectory.”
H2O.ai is leveraging its partnerships for global reach with major technology platforms like NVIDIA, IBM, AWS, Intel, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Snowflake, and IBM RedHat.
“NVIDIA has been working with H2O.ai for several years and we’re pleased to help accelerate their business with this further investment,” pointed out Jeff Herbst — VP of Business Development and Head of GPU Ventures at NVIDIA. “H2O.ai is doing groundbreaking work in AI and machine learning, and their innovative GPU-accelerated Driverless AI platform is gaining significant traction in markets around the world.”
“The results we’ve got with H2O are promising, we are now looking at wider adoption of the AI models across the Equity trading floor for market-making,” stated Erdit Hoxha — the Head of European Equity Trading at Goldman Sachs Securities Division.
H2O.ai also announced its latest release of H2O Driverless AI which empowers every company to be an AI company.
