DataRobot is Taking MLOps Demand to the Next Enterprise AI Level

Since LinkedIn has locked me out of my own AI Newsletter, so I'll have to post this here.

DataRobot is a Boston based startup that wants make machine learning so simple that a business analyst with basic training can run predictive models without breaking a sweat. 

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DataRobot is in advanced discussions to raise fresh capital of about $500 million in a funding round that could value the machine learning startup at more than $7 billion according to a note by Reuters (people familiar with the matter).

Apparently and perhaps not surprisingly, during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has pushed people to work remotely, has accelerated the use of data tools provided by companies such as DataRobot.

DataRobot is yet another AI enterprise startup, you can visit their site here.

What Does it Do?

Founded in 2012, DataRobot offers a subscription-based machine learning platform to help companies use big data to perform predictive analytics, a process that otherwise would require manual effort.

Predictive analytics is one of the more popular uses of AI. It counts the likes of United Airlines and Deloitte among its customers. The company said last year that its annual recurring revenue was well over $100 million, after a pickup in growth during the pandemic. Tiger Global, an existing investor in DataRobot, will participate in the round.

DataRobot appears to have a significant AI for Good play. It’s part of a the democratization of AI movement, enabling other startups and businesses to use AI and utilize AI better to handle data.

As a result DataRobot claims to be the leading end-to-end enterprise AI platform that automates and accelerates every step of your path from data to value. You can see DataRobot in the news here. DataRobot is yet another AI company that claims to unlock value for B2B clients and democratize AI for businesses globally.

Yet here is also MLops boosting automation and enabling aspects of AI that you don’t hear about every day. DataRobot’s vision has been simple: enabling a range of users within enterprises, from business and IT users to data scientists, to gather data and build, test and deploy ML models quickly. Between 2015 and 2020 DataRobot boasted triple digit yearly growth and acquired many Fortune 50 Clients.

So why is Enterprise AI such a hot sector? As artificial intelligence pushed into the enterprise, the first step was to go from data to a working ML model, which started with data scientists doing this manually, but today is increasingly automated and has become known as “auto ML.” An auto-ML platform like DataRobot’s can let an enterprise user quickly auto-select features based on their data and auto-generate a number of models to see which ones work best.

That in a nutshell is what DataRobot does, and why it’s a hot AI company. A round of $500 million in funding certainly will help accelerate that growth. An automated machine learning platform for everyone.

(3 Years old Video)

DataRobot is popular amid Retailers, to:

• Forecast daily demand by store
• Predict Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

It’s also used often in Financial Services and the Healthcare industry. The company really is an MLOps leader, and was part of Forbes Top 50 AI companies list. A contemporary competitor would be H20.ai. Enterprise AI companies are quite popular in the democratization of AI movement of the 2020s.

• People like Andrew Ng have been urging the ML community to be more data centric (as opposed to Model centric) and focused on things like MLops. So while Andrew Ng is drawing the ML community’s attention towards MLOps, a field dealing with building and deploying machine learning models more systematically, DataRobot is achieving it for impactful predictive analytics for industry that's saving companies time and money.

What do you think about MLops and its application in the business world? What other AI Enterprise companies do you feel are legit?