The AI cloud company H2O.ai has entered the billion-dollar club. The machine learning startup has raised over $100 million in new funding, taking its valuation to $1.7 billion, more than quadrupling its previous valuation.
H2O.ai delivers AI services to more than 20,000 organizations worldwide, millions of data scientists, and over half of the Fortune 500. Its newest funding will allow the company to expand partnerships, sales, marketing, and customer satisfaction around the globe further, or in other words, to fuel its growth.
The company’s growth was mainly propelled by the H2O AI Cloud’s quick adoption. It was debuted in January 2021, and it will bring all of H2O.ai’s products together on a single, unified platform.
Primarily, it was created to serve H2O.ai’s fundamental objective of democratizing AI by making it easier to develop responsible AI that consumers can trust, run it effectively, and innovate with pre-built AI apps.
The H20.ai will simplify the process of businesses automating their business operations, acquiring new insights from data, and delighting their customers and workers. In other words, the cloud will be with its clients each step of the way on their Artificial Intelligence journey.
We’re excited to announce our #SeriesE funding led by customer @CommBank to help us further our mission to democratize AI & drive growth through customer innovation, powered by the H2O #AICloud.
Learn more about our $100M funding in @TechCrunch‘s news?: https://t.co/qUBZL9O5u3
— H2O.ai (@h2oai) November 8, 2021
Sri Ambati, who serves the role of a founder and CEO of H2O.ai, had this to say:
H2O.ai is picking winners in every vertical on every continent and making them AI superpowers to take on the tech giants with the H2O AI Cloud. Our innovative maker culture and customer obsession have won the trust and love of our customers, and they have led every growth funding round at H2O.ai.
The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), a strategic backer and a customer of H20.ai led the Series E funding round. The company will use these funds to strengthen the partnership between the two further and build new services.
Goldman Sachs, Pivot Investment Partners, Crane Venture Partners, Wells Fargo, New York Life, NVIDIA, and Celesta Capital also took place in the round.
Mr. Ambati added:
Commonwealth Bank and H2O.ai are led by our core belief that we can make the world better by serving our communities and customers with AI. This strategic partnership between the leading global AI Cloud movement and Australia’s largest bank will unleash the juggernaut of co-innovation and will further democratize AI with trust and freedom. This will be fun.
Matt Comyn, who serves the role of a CEO at Commonwealth Bank of Australia, had this to say:
Commonwealth Bank processes and makes decisions based on millions of data points collected every day. AI has already helped us to improve our customer experience. However, we know there is untapped potential to do more. The investment in and strategic partnership with H2O.ai extends our leadership in artificial intelligence and ultimately boosts the bank’s ability to offer leading digital propositions and reimagine products and services to customers.
Andrew McMullan has been serving the role of Chief Data and Analytics Officer of CBA. Now, he has joined the board of directors of H2O.ai and CBA. He has also formed a strategic relationship to help CBA strengthen its AI skills, co-create financial services AI apps powered by the H2O AI Cloud, and collaborate on community and environmental projects.
McMullan had the following to say:
I’ve worked in this field for 25 years, and this is the best platform and product I have had the privilege of using in my career so far. We’re committed to improving every one of the 35 million decisions that we deliver to our customers every single day – whether via our app, online banking platform, branches, or Australian call centers. In order to do that, we had to find the best solution across the globe. Every single experience we build together with H2O.ai has been significantly better than what it replaces.
