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 BrandZTM Top 100 Most Valuable
Global Brands list. For more information, please visit
www.pingan.cn
H2O.ai Media Contact:
Russell
Castronovo
Russ.castronovo@H2O.ai
408-391-9632
Goldman Sachs Media Contact:
Patrick Lenihan
Patrick.R.Lenihan@gs.com
212-357-0025
Ping An Media Contacts:
Gareth Hewett (English enquiries)
gareth.john@pingan.com.hk
+852 6882 2027
KW Lam (Chinese enquiries)
kw.lam@pingan.com.hk
+852 6303 3481
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SOURCE H2O.ai