H20.ai, Focused on Machine Learning, Closes $20 Million in Funding

H2O.ai, formerly known as Oxdata, has steadily been carving out a niche with its  open source software for big data analysis and machine learning. The company has been involved in transformative processes, losing the Oxdata name, and now it has announced a new funding round that it is getting to the tune of $20 million.

Paxion Capital Partners led the round with existing investors Nexus Venture Partners and Transamerica Corporation and new participant Capital One Growth Ventures joining. The Series B round brings H2O.ai's total amount of funding raised to $34 million.

We interviewed Oleg Rogynskyy, VP of Marketing & Growth at H2O.ai, here (he is shown in the photo) He told us:

"H2O’s machine learning technology can take a vast quantity of data and reduce it to manageable, actionable insights. To illustrate, one of our customers, Cisco, uses 60,000 models to predict purchasing decisions. Our technology was able to quickly and accurately score all these models 10-15x faster than their previous solution according to Cisco’s principal data scientist, Lou Carvalheira. In addition, H2O makes data scientists more efficient by automating many of their most tedious duties, such as data munging, so that they can focus their attention on more critical tasks."

"All of our customers use our tools to make better predictions. Many, like Cisco and PayPal, already have extensive predictive models in place. For organizations like these our primary goal is to make the predictive process easier by offering them a way to score their models faster and more accurately. Other organizations lack the in-house technical expertise to develop their own models, so we offer software and support to help them create predictive metrics from scratch. These models are used to predict fraud, calculate risk and determine consumer preferences, to give just a few examples."

"You know something special is happening when sophisticated algorithms are given speed through parallel and distributed architecture and made accessible through easy to use APIs and open source," said Jishnu Bhattacharjee, Managing Director of Nexus Venture Partners. "Applications are getting smarter; graduating from rule based operations to intelligent actions driven by the new SQL: machine learning. We are thrilled to partner with Sri and the H2O.ai team to help build a company that is redefining how organizations leverage data with machine learning."

"Algorithms are transforming every business," said Sri Ambati, Co-founder and CEO of H2O.ai. "H2O reduces time to insight without the cost and lock-in of proprietary stacks and operationalizes data science through data products and smart applications. 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. Every business can tap into AI, not just BI."

H2O says it will use its Series B raise to scale the company's sales, marketing and customer success teams. "Funds will also be used to build a robust ecosystem of partners on the H2O platform and its delivery via the Steam and Sparkling Water products," the company reports.