H2O.ai, the maker of the number one open source machine learning platform for building smarter applications, today announced the close of a $20 million Series B funding round. 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. Michael Marks, founding partner of Paxion and Walden Riverwood Capital will join the H2O.ai board of directors.

'I'd be shocked if every company in the world wouldn't benefit from using H2O,' said Michael Marks, who transformed Flextronics into a multi-billion dollar giant and helped build phenomenal growth companies like Zappos.

'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.ai's leading machine learning platform, H2O, has seen explosive download growth of 300% YoY, with active installations in over 5,000 organizations. Over 10 percent of the world's data scientists now use H2O to create and deploy predictive models. This year alone H2O.ai signed 25 new customers including AT&T, Comcast, Kaiser Permanente, McKesson, Walgreens, Capital One, Progressive, Transamerica Corporation and Zurich Insurance Group.

'Progressive is an incredibly data-driven company, Big Data is woven into our fabric,' said Pawan Divakarla, data and analytics business leader at Progressive Insurance. 'With more than 14 billion miles of driving data collected through our telematics offering Snapshot, we see value in how H2O is helping build models and derive insights in just seconds with their open source technology.'

'We first came to H2O.ai as customers,' said Lauren Connolley, Venture Partner at Capital One Growth Ventures. 'We were quickly impressed with H2O's power to operationalize data science and the critical role H2O plays as a bridge between data science and application development. We are excited to partner with H2O.ai, working with them as they scale their efforts in financial services and help us as we develop unique solutions to better serve our customers.'

H2O.ai will use its Series B raise to scale the company's sales, marketing and customer success teams and to support exponential growth in customers and community. 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.

'H2O's sold-out annual community conference, H2O World, will bring together 50+ customers, community leaders and researchers to speak to a data science audience of over 700 people. To see a live stream of the event visit: http://h2oworld.h2o.ai/.'

About H2O.ai

H2O is the #1 open source machine learning platform for smarter applications. H2O.ai is the silicon valley software company supporting and developing H2O. Leading insurance, healthcare and financial services companies are using H2O to make smarter predictions about churn, pricing, fraud and more. H2O.ai is fostering a grassroots movement of systems engineers, data scientists, data developers and predictive analysts to move machine learning forward. A rapidly growing community of H2O users is now active in more than 5,000 organizations worldwide. H2O.ai is a Gartner Cool Vendor in Data Science for 2015.