H2O.ai Raises $72.5M Led by Goldman Sachs and Ping An to Democratize AI

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Aug. 20, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- 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.

"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."

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.

 "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.

Finally, H2O.ai also announced its latest release of H2O Driverless AI which empowers every company to be an AI company. See the news at https://www.h2o.ai/company/news/

About H2O.ai
H2O.ai is the open source leader in AI and automatic machine learning with a mission to democratize AI for everyone. H2O.ai is transforming the use of AI to empower every company to be an AI company in financial services, insurance, healthcare, telco, retail, pharmaceutical and marketing. H2O.ai is driving an open AI movement with H2O, which is used by more than 18,000 companies and hundreds of thousands of data scientists. H2O Driverless AI, an award winning and industry leading automatic machine learning platform for the enterprise, is helping data scientists across the world in every industry be more productive and deploy models in a faster, easier and cheaper way. H2O.ai believes in innovation with a purpose and AI4Good with support for wildlife conservation and is free for academic use. Learn more at www.H2O.ai

About Goldman Sachs
The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. is a leading global investment banking, securities and investment management firm that provides a wide range of financial services to a substantial and diversified client base that includes corporations, financial institutions, governments and individuals. Founded in 1869, the firm is headquartered in New York and maintains offices in all major financial centers around the world.

About Ping An Group 
Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, Ltd. ("Ping An") is a world-leading technology-powered retail financial services group. With 196 million retail customers and 576 million Internet users, Ping An is one of the largest financial services companies in the world. Ping An has two over-arching strategies, "pan financial assets" and "pan healthcare," which focus on the provision of financial and healthcare services through our integrated financial services platform and our five ecosystems of financial services, health care, auto services, real estate services and smart city services. Our "finance + technology" and "finance + ecosystems" strategies aim to provide customers and internet users with innovative and simple products and services. As China's first joint stock insurance company, Ping An Group is committed to upholding the highest standards of corporate reporting and corporate governance. The Company is listed on the stock exchanges in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Ping An ranked 7th on the Forbes Global 2000 list and 29th on the Fortune Global 500 list. Ping An also ranked 40th on the 2019 WPP Millward Brown BrandZ^TM Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands list. For more information, please visit www.pingan.cn 

H2O.ai Media Contact:
Russell Castronovo
[email protected]
408-391-9632

Goldman Sachs Media Contact:
Patrick Lenihan
[email protected]
212-357-0025

Ping An Media Contacts:
Gareth Hewett (English enquiries)
[email protected] 
+852 6882 2027

KW Lam (Chinese enquiries)
[email protected] 
+852 6303 3481

SOURCE H2O.ai

Related Links

https://www.h2o.ai