H2Oai Raises $72.5 Million Led by Goldman Sachs and Ping an to Democratize AI

Investment Powers H2O.ai to Transform Every Company to Be an AI Company

H2O.ai, the open source leader in artificial intelligence and automatic machine learning for the enterprise, announced it has secured $72.5 million in a Series D round, bringing the total funding to $147 million. The round was led by Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) and the Ping An Global Voyager Fund(OTCMKTS: PNGAY) with continued investments from Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFC), NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) and Nexus Venture Partners. Jade Mandel from Goldman Sachs will be joining the H2O.ai Board of Directors.

Since the last round, H2O Driverless AI, the award winning and industry leading automatic machine learning platform, has tripled H2O.ai’s customer base with expansion across every industry on every continent. H2O.ai has also grown 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. Customers of H2O.ai are becoming AI companies including leaders such as Aetna, Booking.com, Capital One, Comcast, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Franklin Templeton, Hitachi, MarketAxess, Nationwide Insurance, PwC, Tokio Marine, Wells Fargo and Walgreens, leading AI transformations in their respective verticals.

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“H2O.ai is democratizing AI and powering the imagination of every entrepreneur and business globally – we are making them the true AI superpowers,” said Sri Ambati, CEO and Founder at H2O.ai. “Our customers are unlocking discovery in every sphere and walk of life and challenging the dominance of technology giants. This will be fun.”

“We’re thrilled to partner with the H2O.ai team on their mission to democratize artificial intelligence,” said Jade Mandel, Vice President, Principal Strategic Investments Group at Goldman Sachs. “Their deep technical bench and customer centricity make them well positioned to bring transparency and efficiency to the world of prediction.”

“We are keen on how the power of artificial intelligence enables insightful and personalized client experiences, and enhances our work with our clients,” said Basil Darwish, Managing Director, 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.”

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With this new round of investment, the company plans to accelerate innovation and expand sales and marketing globally. The new investment will be used to further simplify AI for business users with new and ground-breaking technologies. H2O.ai will 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.

“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 of the Ping An Global Voyager Fund.

Since its founding in 2012, H2O.ai has been on a mission to democratize AI for everyone. 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. With continuous feedback from the community, H2O.ai innovates to deliver the best platform to delight data scientists. The company’s premier community and customer event, H2O World New York, will be held on Oct. 22, 2019.

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“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 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 has built a strong ecosystem of data scientists, partners and customers. H2O.ai leverages its strong partnerships for global reach with leading technology companies including 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,” said Jeff Herbst, Vice President 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,” said Erdit Hoxha, Head of European Equity Trading at Goldman Sachs Securities Division.

H2O.ai is poised to win world-wide with its strong global investor base that includes Barclays, Capital One, Crane Ventures, CreditEase, Goldman Sachs, New York Life, Nexus Venture Partners, NVIDIA, Paxion Ventures, Ping An Global Voyager Fund, SST Holdings, TransAmerica, Walden River Wood and Wells Fargo.

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