The venture capital train cruising around the analytics ecosystem made its latest stop in the machine learning space to unload $20 million on H20.ai Inc., the startup behind the open-source algorithm development platform of the same name. The funding tops off a record year that saw downloads of the software more than triple from the previous 12 months.

H20 estimates that over 10 percent of the world’s data scientists now employ its platform to help their applications make automated decisions in fields like online advertising, where a new targeting opportunity can come and go much faster than a human is able to react. Handling millions of such events every second the way Google does requires an algorithm that is not only capable of picking the best promotion to serve to a particular user, but also operate parallely on a massive scale.

The distributed nature of H20 enables data scientists to simulate these conditions in their development projects to ensure that the code performs as expected after rolling out to production. That’s much harder to guarantee in traditional machine learning environments that limit tests to using only a small subset of the information an algorithm is expected to process due to architectural constraints. Flaws that only become apparent on bigger scales can slip through unnoticed as a result, potentially causing trouble down the line.

H20 avoids not just the setbacks that arise from having to correct a model after it’s already been launched, but also the time a data scientist has to spend waiting for a test or an optimization to complete, which can take quite a while when the underlying environment is only able to use so much hardware. The combined productivity increase from eliminating these bottlenecks has earned the platform a place at more than 5,000 organizations.

Among the latest additions to the list are AT&T Inc., Comcast Corp. and The Walgreen Company, which also are employing H20’s commercial services to support their deployments. The new funding from Paxion Capital Partners, Capital One and existing investors will help the startup expand its efforts to monetize its platform and add more features in order to keep the current momentum going. The former firm’s Michael Marks is joining the board to help see the effort through.

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