Series C round led by Wells Fargo and NVIDIA
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — November 30, 2017 — H2O.ai, the leading company bringing AI to enterprises, today announced it has completed a $40 million Series C round of funding led by Wells Fargo and NVIDIA with participation from New York Life, Crane Venture Partners, Nexus Venture Partners and Transamerica Ventures, the corporate venture capital fund of Transamerica and Aegon Group. The Series C round brings H2O.ai's total amount of funding raised to $75 million. The new investment will be used to further democratize advanced machine learning and for global expansion and innovation of Driverless AI, an automated machine learning and pipelining platform that uses “AI to do AI.”
H2O.ai continued its juggernaut growth in 2017 as evidenced by new platforms and partnerships. The company launched Driverless AI, a product that automates AI for non-technical users and introduces visualization and interpretability features that explain the data modeling results in plain English, thus fostering further adoption and trust in artificial intelligence.
H2O.ai has partnered with NVIDIA to democratize machine learning on the NVIDIA GPU compute platform. It has also partnered with IBM, Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure to bring its best-in-class machine learning platform to other infrastructures and the public cloud.
H2O.ai co-founded the GPU Open Analytics Initiative (GOAI) to create an ecosystem for data developers and researchers to advance data science using GPUs, and has launched H2O4GPU, a collection of the fastest GPU algorithms on the market capable of processing massive amounts of unstructured data up to 40x faster than on traditional CPUs.
“AI is eating both hardware and software,” said Sri Ambati, co-founder and CEO at H2O.ai. “Billions of devices are generating unprecedented amounts of data, which truly calls for distributed machine learning that is ubiquitous and fast. Our focus on automating machine learning makes it easily accessible to large enterprises. Our maker culture fosters deep trust and teamwork with our customers, and our partnerships with vendors across industry verticals bring significant value and growth to our community. It is quite supportive and encouraging to see our partners lead a significant funding round to help H2O.ai deliver on its mission.”
“AI is an incredible force that’s sweeping across the technology landscape,” said Jeff Herbst, vice president of business development at NVIDIA. “H2O.ai is exceptionally well positioned in this field as it pursues its mission to become the world’s leading data science platform for the financial services industry and beyond. Its use of GPU-accelerated AI provides powerful tools for customers, and we look forward to continuing our collaboration with them.”
“It is exhilarating to have backed the H2O.ai journey from day zero: the journey from a PowerPoint to becoming the enterprise AI platform essential for thousands of corporations across the planet,” said Jishnu Bhattarcharjee, managing director at Nexus Venture Partners. “AI has arrived, transforming industries as we know them. Exciting scale ahead for H2O, so fasten your seat belts!"
As the leading open-source platform for machine learning, H2O.ai is leveling the playing field in a space where much of the AI innovation and talent is locked up inside major tech titans and thus inaccessible to other enterprises. This is precisely why over 100,000 data scientists, 12,400 organizations and nearly half of the Fortune 500 have embraced H2O.ai’s suite of products that pack the productivity of an elite data science team into a single solution.
“We are delighted to lead H2O.ai’s funding round. We have been following the company’s progress and have been impressed by its high-caliber management team and success in establishing an open-source machine learning platform with wide adoption across many industries. We are excited to support the next phase of their development,” said Basil Darwish, director of strategic investments at Wells Fargo Securities.
Beyond its open source community, H2O.ai is transforming several industry verticals and building strong customer partnerships. Over the past 18 months, the company has worked with PwC to build PwC’s “GL.ai,” a revolutionary bot that uses AI and machine learning to ‘x-ray’ a business and detect anomalies in the general ledger. The product was named the 'Audit Innovation of the Year' by the International Accounting Bulletin in October 2017.
H2O’s signature community conference, H2O World will take place on December 4-5, 2017 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.
About H2O.ai
H2O.ai’s mission is to democratize machine learning through its leading open source software platform. Its flagship product, H2O.ai empowers enterprise clients to quickly deploy machine learning and predictive analytics to accelerate business transformation for critical applications such as predictive maintenance and operational intelligence. H2O.ai recently launched Driverless AI, the first solution that allows any business -- even ones without a team of talented data scientists -- to implement AI to solve complex business problems. The product was reviewed and selected as Editor’s Choice in InfoWorld. Customers include Capital One, Progressive Insurance, Comcast, Walgreens and Kaiser Permanente. For more information and to learn more about how H2O.ai is transforming businesses, visit www.h2o.ai.
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