H2O.ai Raises $20M For Its Open Source Machine Learning Platform

H2O is an open source platform for data scientists and developers who need a fast machine learning engine for their applications. H2O.ai, the company behind the service, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series B funding round led by Paxion Capital Partners (the new firm of GoPro board member Michael Marks) and existing investors Nexus Venture Partners and Transamerica. New investor Capital One Growth Ventures also joined this round. In total, the company has now raised $34 million.

The H2O platform the company’s main product, but it also offers a number of tools around that platform. These include Sparkling Water, which combines the Apache Spark data processing engine with the H2O platform (see where that name comes from?), as well as Flow, an open source notebook-style user interface for H2O (similar to iPython notebooks).

crimeDL_fig1“H2O reduces time to insight without the cost and lock-in of proprietary stacks and operationalizes data science through data products and smart applications,” H2O.ai CEO and co-founder Sri Ambati said in today’s announcement. “This funding will support the explosive growth in our customer community and the application developer ecosystem in key verticals emerging from the open source platform. We’ll further simplify the use of machine learning to transform rule-based software to real-time learning-based smart applications. We are excited to democratize the use of predictions via Excel and APIs in the cloud and make prediction as ubiquitous as search.”

The company says it signed 25 new customers this year, including AT&T, Comcast, Kaiser Permanente, Walgreens, Progressive, Transamerica Corporation and Zurich Insurance Group. Over 5,000 organizations now actively use the service according to H2O.ai’s own data. Its new investor Capital One Growth Ventures also first came to the company as a customer.

H2O.ai, which monetizes the platform through its support offerings, says it will use this new funding round to scale its sales, marketing and customer success teams. In addition, the company also plans to use these funds to expand the partner ecosystem around the H2O platform and improve the way it delivers its services through its Steam and Sparkling Water products.