H20.ai gets $72.5M funding to bring AI to the masses

Artificial intelligence firm H20.ai Inc. has just bagged a $72.5 million round of funding as it looks to further its mission of democratizing AI for businesses of all shapes and sizes.

The Series D round was led by Goldman Sachs and Chinese venture capital firm Ping An Global Voyager Fund, and almost doubles the amount the company has raised previously, bringing its total funding to just shy of $147 milion. Existing backers Wells Fargo, Nvidia GPU Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners also participated in the round.

H20 has a goal of making it “faster, cheaper and easier” for businesses of any description to use AI. Its main product is called H20 Driverless AI, which is an apt name for a platform that’s designed to enable people who aren’t experts in the technology to take advantage of it.

Driverless AI helps to eliminate the complex and repetitive work that’s involved in the development of AI models. Driverless AI works by helping users to choose the best machine learning model for their particular task. Those models can them be customized for the specific type of data the user wants to process. So, for example, if a bank is trying to build an AI system capable of spotting fraudulent transactions, it would prioritize the kinds of variables that indicate this kind of activity with its training.

In a recent profile of the company, Wikibon analyst James Kobielus said one of H20’s key competitive differentiators is this focus on AI developer productivity.

“The vendor has focused on providing user-friendly tooling that can be used by business analysts and other subject matter experts to build and optimize AI without need for traditional data scientists,” Kobielus said. “Its Driverless AI solution automates the end-to-end workflow of building, training, deploying, optimizing, and governing ML models.”

In addition to today’s funding announcement, H20 also updated its platform with a new recipe concept that provides users with all of the ingredients they need to build AI models for different business tasks. The platform now comes with 100 open-source recipes for workloads such as credit risk scoring, anomaly detection and property valuation, among others.

The new release also includes features that should help DevOps teams to mitigate some of the risks associated with machine learning. These include the ability to analyze if a particular model might be vulnerable to so-called ‘bias’, in which it produces disparate adverse outcomes for various demographic groups even if it wasn’t designed with that outcome in mind. The platform also provides alerts for when models need to be recalibrated or retrained to ensure they remain production ready.

“Ensuring that AI DevOps teams work seamlessly together is a big part of the risk-mitigation picture, and H2O.ai also has strong capabilities in this regard,” Kobielus said.

H20 Chief Executive Officer Sri Ambati (pictured) said the company plans to use the new funds to accelerate innovation and expand its sales and marketing efforts.

“H2O.ai is democratizing AI and powering the imagination of every entrepreneur and business globally,” Ambati said. “Our customers are unlocking discovery in every sphere and walk of life and challenging the dominance of technology giants. This will be fun.”

Photo: H20/Twitter