Goldman Sachs leads $72.5 mn Series D in AI startup H2O.ai

Silicon Valley-based H2O.ai, an open source platform that offers artificial intelligence (AI) and automatic machine learning solutions for enterprises, has raised $72.5 million in a Series D round of funding led by Goldman Sachs and Ping An Global Voyager Fund.

The round also saw participation from Wells Fargo, Nvidia and Nexus Venture Partners, a company statement said.

With the current round, the total funding of the company now stands at $147 million. The statement also said that Jade Mandel from Goldman Sachs will join the H2O.ai board of directors.

The company plans to use the funds to accelerate innovation and expand sales and marketing globally. The new investment will be used to further simplify AI for business users with new technologies. H2O.ai will also invest in its academic programme which is freely available to students, researchers and universities.

Since the last round, H2O Driverless AI — a machine learning platform — has tripled H2O.ai’s customer base, the statement said.

H2O Driverless AI is helping data scientists in several industries to be more productive and deploy models in a faster, easier and cheaper way.

The company was founded in 2012 by Sri Satish Ambati and Cliff Click. H2O.ai helps companies in financial services, insurance, healthcare, telco, retail, pharmaceutical and marketing use AI solutions.  

H2O.ai has AI centres of excellence in Prague and Chennai. Its 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 Ambati.

H2O.ai has partnered with technology companies like Nvidia, IBM, AWS, Intel, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Snowflake and IBM RedHat.

“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,” said Donald Lacey, managing director and COO, Ping An Global Voyager Fund.

“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,” said Jishnu Bhattacharjee, managing director, 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.”