AI Firm H20 Gets $72.5M In Series D Funding Round

H20.ai, an artificial intelligence (AI) company based out of California, has raised $72.5 million in a Series D funding round, according to a report by Reuters. 

Goldman Sachs and Ping An Global Voyager Fund from China led the round, and Wells Fargo, NVIDIA Corp and Nexus Venture Partners all invested again. H20 has raised a total of $147 million so far.

The AI company was started in 2012 to help other companies that don’t have the know-how, time or expertise to be able to utilize AI and its rapid institutional changes. The firm has clients like Aetna, Booking.com, Wells Fargo and Capital One.

It provides a platform that will do model building, engineering and analytical calculations on large amounts of a company’s data.

H20 provides its customers with “recipes” to automate AI processes, like training, building and using models. It also aids a company’s employees when they want to make custom models, according to chief executive and founder Sri Ambati.  

“Our mission is to make our customers AI companies … and (to reduce) the barrier for new data scientists to produce great models,” Ambati said.

When it comes to a company like Goldman Sachs, H20 collaborates with traders in different groups, like fixed-income or equity, to enhance bond pricing processes.

“The results we’ve got with H2O are promising, (and) we are now looking at wider adoption of the AI models across the equity trading floor for market-making,” said Erdit Hoxha, Goldman’s head of European equity trading.

H20 said it’s going to use the capital for expansion and to fuel marketing and sales to a global scale. It also wants to develop more products. 

Goldman Sachs also recently led a $20 million Series A funding round in freight logistics startup Kobo360 in Nigeria. 

Kobo360 connects truckers seeking work with companies that need deliveries across Nigeria, Togo, Ghana and Kenya. The funding will be used for platform improvements and expansion efforts to an additional 10 countries. Those new countries will be decided by the first quarter of 2020, Kobo360’s CEO and co-founder Obi Ozor said.