US-based enterprise-focused artificial intelligence (AI) startup H2O.ai Tuesday announced that it has secured $72.5 million in a Series D funding round led by Goldman Sachs and the Ping An Global Voyager Fund as it looks to expand footprint in China and other Asian markets.
Existing investors who participated in the financing included Wells Fargo, NVIDIA, and Nexus Venture Partners. The latest round takes the company’s total funding to $147 million till date, H2O.ai said in a statement.
As part of the investment, Jade Mandel from Goldman Sachs will be joining the H2O.ai board of directors.
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 technologies, the statement added.
“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.
H2O.ai further said it will continue to innovate to support AI4Good with a focus on wildlife and water conservation, and invest in its academic program that makes the H2O.ai portfolio freely available to students, researchers and universities.
Founded in 2012, H2O.ai raised $40 million in its Series C round led by Wells Fargo and NVIDIA in November 2017. It also counts Barclays, Capital One, Crane Ventures, CreditEase, Paxion Ventures, SST Holdings, TransAmerica, and Walden River Wood among its investors.
Since the last round, H2O Driverless AI claims to have 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.
Its clientele include Booking.com, Comcast, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Franklin Templeton, Hitachi, Nationwide Insurance, PwC, Tokio Marine, among others.
“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.
