DataRobot Acquires Paxata to Bolster its End-to-End AI Capabilities

Leaders of Enterprise AI and Enterprise Data Prep Combine Forces to Make It Easy for Customers to Succeed with AI

DataRobot, the leader in enterprise AI, announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Paxata, the pioneer of self-service data preparation and leading data fabric provider, to fulfill its mission to build the world’s first automated end-to-end enterprise AI platform.

“With the addition of the AI-enabled data prep and enterprise data fabric solution from Paxata, we will now give business users the industry’s most complete enterprise-class platform to automate the AI lifecycle from start to finish.”

While the massive impact of AI on enterprises is well understood – PwC forecasts by 2030 AI could contribute $15.7 trillion to the global economy – companies must overcome several key challenges associated with AI in order to reap the benefits and become successful. Data preparation is one area that has historically held companies back. Creating a dataset for training predictive models, deploying data prep steps with AI models, and preparing data specific to AI routines are all major challenges companies face when it comes to leveraging data at scale.

By providing tools that help users build automation into their data prep processes, the Paxata acquisition will alleviate these pain points for customers and dramatically enhance their ability to achieve AI-driven outcomes rapidly. Further, as enterprises move to a multi-cloud, hybrid world, it is imperative that an underlying data fabric that combines enterprise scale, security, and governance is a core part of the enterprise AI infrastructure.

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“Data prep for AI has been a long-standing challenge for AI projects,” said Jeremy Achin, CEO and Co-founder, DataRobot. “With the addition of the AI-enabled data prep and enterprise data fabric solution from Paxata, we will now give business users the industry’s most complete enterprise-class platform to automate the AI lifecycle from start to finish.”

Paxata, which has raised $86 million in venture capital funding, is used by thousands of users across the largest companies in the world, including Standard Chartered Bank, Petco, and Nationwide Insurance. Both DataRobot and Paxata already extensively leverage Apache Spark™, the open-source distributed framework designed for high scale data integration workloads. As a combined force, the companies will leapfrog the industry by delivering the only multi-cloud end-to-end AI platform with proven scale and governance for the enterprise.

As part of the acquisition, the companies today unveiled a first-of-its-kind integration into DataRobot’s AI Catalog, making it easier for business analysts and citizen data scientists to prepare data for machine learning. In addition to the new capability that is available today, the teams will work together to refine and bolster the next generation of data preparation for AI in 2020. DataRobot will also continue to support existing Paxata customers.

“Combining AI-enabled data prep from Paxata with enterprise AI capabilities from DataRobot will supercharge our ability to transform data and deliver better outcomes all within one platform,” said Ben Haines, SVP, Chief Information Officer at Verizon Media. “As a current customer of both companies, we recognize the strategic value of this acquisition and look forward to the added capabilities that the integration and new data prep offering will provide.”

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“Artificial Intelligence is fast becoming a business imperative. However, as per IDC’s 2019 Global AI survey, lack of adequate volumes and quality of training data and lack of data science talent have held back AI adoption. Businesses report spending over 50% of the AI lifecycle time in data prep and deployment than actual data science,” said Ritu Jyoti, Program Vice President, AI strategies at IDC. “DataRobot’s AI Catalog integration with Paxata addresses the data prep for AI challenge head-on and will empower AI-powered organizations to deliver more sophisticated business outcomes.”

“From day one, our vision has been to enable enterprises to build a data fabric foundation that helps them achieve their digital and AI transformation,” said Prakash Nanduri, CEO and Co-Founder, Paxata. “No one platform served the needs of enterprises when it came to finding, prepping, consuming, and governing data and simultaneously building, deploying, and maintaining AI solutions at an enterprise scale – until today. We’ve been working with DataRobot to build the next-generation integrated experience and, going forward, our combined entity will have the global scale to deliver on our joint vision.”

The Paxata acquisition is DataRobot’s third and largest acquisition in 2019 and fifth since 2017. Paxata builds on the success of DataRobot’s previous acquisitions, including ParallelM, which has been integrated via its MLOps offering, and Cursor, which has been integrated via the AI Catalog. Paxata is a key piece of the end-to-end platform puzzle and will deliver massive value for the combined DataRobot and Paxata customer base.

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