Goldman Sachs coled $72.5 million round in AI company H2O.ai

H2O.ai on Tuesday closed a $72.5 million series D funding round led by Goldman Sachs and the Ping An Global Voyager Fund.

The startup automates how companies apply artificial intelligence across their businesses.

Ediz Ozkaya, Goldman Sachs' head of AI strategies in securities, told Business Insider the bank was attracted to how easily H2O.ai's tools merged with the work Goldman was already doing in artificial intelligence.

Click here for more BI Prime stories.

A startup hoping to democratize the use of artificial intelligence just got a big boost from one of the most prestigious firms on Wall Street and the world's largest insurance company.

H2O.ai on Tuesday closed a $72.5 million series D funding round coled by Goldman Sachs and the Ping An Global Voyager Fund, a subsidiary of the China-based Ping An Insurance. Wells Fargo, NVIDIA, and Nexus Venture Partners, all previous investors, also participated in the round.

The Silicon Valley-based company works across a variety of industries, including financial services, insurance, and healthcare, with a goal of giving every company the ability to use AI technology, regardless of their size or expertise in the tech. H2O Driverless AI, the company's flagship product, helps users deploy machine-learning techniques cheaper and faster than if they attempted to do it entirely on their own.

Read more: Big Wall Street banks are quietly forming a group to explore the hidden risks in AI, and it shows how much the finance industry still has to learn about the technology

Larger firms that already have established AI teams, such as those on Wall Street, are also using the company's tech.

Goldman Sachs was a customer of H2O.ai before the investment. Ediz Ozkaya, Goldman Sachs' head of AI strategies in securities, told Business Insider one of the things that attracted the bank to the startup initially was the fact it could easily be merged with the work Goldman was already doing in AI.

The bank had already invested significant time and resources into AI technology internally, Ozkaya said, and wasn't willing to throw it away for a vendor solution.

“It is not a product trying to do everything better than the experts in their domain. They actually focus on a few things they do really well, and you are able to bring in your expertise to work with that,” Ozkaya said. “They still let you bring in your domain-specific AI capability and let you to connect it to the product through a set of standardized interfaces that they call recipes.”

The startup has proved particularly popular among Wall Street firms hoping to benefit from the use of artificial intelligence. In addition to Goldman Sachs, H2O.ai counts Well Fargo, Franklin Templeton, and the electronic trading venue MarketAxess as customers. Sri Ambati, the CEO and founder of H2O.ai, told Business Insider financial services represent about half of H2O.ai's revenue.

Read more: AI has the potential to radically transform financial services. But first banks need to get their data in order.

Since H2O.ai's last raise — a $40 million series C led by Wells Fargo and NVIDIA in November 2017 — the company has tripled its customer base in a nod toward companies increasing interest in how AI is transforming their businesses.

With the latest round of funding, Ambati said he wanted to simplify AI even further. The goal is to put AI-based tools in the hands of those with even less experience using the technology.

Ambati said the company was in the process of working on such a platform, slated to be released later this year, that would be the next step in H20.ai's goal of democratizing AI.

“How to make it as beautiful as Tableau and as effective as Tableau or Excel, but intelligent,” Ambati said. “So, out-of-the-box smart insights.”