EMERGING TECH
EMERGING TECH
EMERGING TECH
Nvidia and Wells Fargo lead $40M round into AI startup H2O.ai
H2O.ai Inc., a Mountain View, California-based maker of artificial intelligence development software, today announced that it has raised $40 million in funding from a consortium led by graphics chip maker Nvidia Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co.
The investment brings the startup’s total raised to $75 million. H2O will use the capital to widen the adoption of its recently launched Driverless AI platform, which aims to make building machine learning less of a challenge. The software achieves that by automating much of the complex, repetitive work historically involved in AI development.
When a user starts a new project, Driverless AI can help them choose the best model for the task at hand from a ready-made template roster available out of the box. Then, an automated optimization mechanism customizes the selected model for the data being processed. If a bank wishes to build an AI for, say, catching fraudulent transactions, the platform could find and prioritize the variables most indicative of such activity so to improve detection.
Driverless AI is based on H2O’s open-source machine learning development platform of the same name. The startup also offers several other tools focused on easing specific aspects of AI projects. Overall, H2O claims that its software is used by 100,000 data scientists and 12,400 organizations, including nearly half of the Fortune 500.
The past few months have seen the startup make moves to further expand its market presence. In June, for example, H2O teamed up with investor Nvidia to form the GPU Open Analytics Initiative. The project is aimed at creating common building blocks for AI models and other workloads that are commonly deployed on graphics processing unit chips.
Another founding member is MapD Technologies Inc., a startup that’s applying such chips for visualizing data. It has received funding from Nvidia as well. The reasoning behind the GPU maker’s investments is fairly straightforward: giving capital to companies whose software requires graphic accelerators can help them win more enterprise customers, which in turn creates higher demand for its silicon.
Image: H2O
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