Member Article

H2O.ai Closes $100 Million in Funding Led by Customer Commonwealth Bank of Australia

Company is now valued at $1.7 billion with rapid adoption of H2O AI Cloud

H2O.ai, the AI Cloud leader, today announced it has closed $100 million in Series E funding led by Australia’s largest bank, customer Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA). H2O.ai has now raised over $250 million and is valued at $1.7 billion. Pivot Investment Partners joins prior investors Goldman Sachs Asset Management and Crane Venture Partners. Existing investors include customers and partners such as Wells Fargo, New York Life and NVIDIA. 20,000 organisations, millions of data scientists, and half of the Fortune 500 trust H2O.ai as their AI provider. The company has a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 78— the highest in the industry. The capital will be used to scale partnerships, sales, marketing, and customer success globally.

“H2O.ai is picking winners in every vertical on every continent and making them AI superpowers to take on the tech giants with the H2O AI Cloud. Our innovative maker culture and customer obsession have won the trust and love of our customers and they have led every growth funding round at H2O.ai,” said Sri Ambati, founder and CEO of H2O.ai. “Commonwealth Bank and H2O.ai are led by our core belief that we can make the world better by serving our communities and customers with AI. This strategic partnership between the leading global AI Cloud movement and Australia’s largest bank will unleash the juggernaut of co-innovation and will further democratize AI with trust and freedom. This will be fun.”

Matt Comyn, Commonwealth Bank of Australia CEO, said: “Commonwealth Bank processes and makes decisions based on millions of data points collected every day. AI already has helped us to improve our customer experience, however, we know there is untapped potential to do more. The investment in and strategic partnership with H2O.ai extends our leadership in artificial intelligence and ultimately boosts the bank’s ability to offer leading digital propositions and reimagine products and services to customers.”

Andrew McMullan, PhD, Chief Data and Analytics Officer of CBA, said: “I’ve worked in this field for 25 years and this is the best platform and product I have had the privilege of using in my career so far. We’re committed to improving every one of the 35 million decisions that we deliver to our customers every single day–whether via our app, online banking platform, branches, or Australian call centers. In order to do that we had to find the best solution across the globe. Every single experience we build together with H2O.ai has been significantly better than what it replaces.”

Andrew McMullan joins the H2O.ai Board of Directors. H2O.ai and CBA have also entered a strategic partnership to further boost CBA’s AI capabilities, co-create financial services AI applications powered by the H2O AI Cloud and together work on initiatives to improve communities and the planet.

Dinkar Jetley, Co-founder and Partner of Pivot Investment Partners, said: “Pivot Investment Partners were deeply impressed by the top-notch team at H2O.ai, its fast-growing roster of marquee clients and the traction it has achieved with its mission to democratize AI technology. AI has the potential to dramatically transform the financial services and insurance markets, and we are excited to partner the leading AI Cloud company to accelerate this transformation across the industry.”

The rapid adoption of the H2O AI Cloud has accelerated the company’s growth. Launched in January 2021, the H2O AI Cloud brings all of H2O.ai’s products together on a single, unified platform. Designed to support H2O.ai’s core mission of democratizing AI, the H2O AI Cloud simplifies making responsible AI that users can trust, operating it efficiently and innovating with pre-built AI applications. As organizations continue to respond to changing customer and employee needs in the Covid pandemic recovery, they have accelerated their digital transformation journeys and AI adoption. H2O.ai is there with customers on every step of their AI journey to make it easier for organizations to automate business processes, gain new insights from their data and delight their customers and employees.

CBA is also participating in H2O.ai’s AI 4 Good initiatives, and recently announced the launch of the H2O.ai Wildfire and Bushfire Challenge, a global hackathon challenge to help reduce the economic and climate impact of wildfires and bushfires. The Challenge aims to provide first responders, local leaders, businesses, and the public with new AI applications that can be used to help predict and mitigate the destruction caused by fires. The Challenge is open now through January 15.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by H2O.ai .