H2O.ai Makes AI Approachable for Enterprises

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According to a recent report, the global artificial intelligence (AI) market is expected to grow at 37% CAGR from $136.55 billion in 2022 through 2030. The growth in the industry is expected to be driven by the continued research and innovation by tech giants who are helping increase the adoption of this technology in industry verticals, such as automotive, healthcare, retail, finance, and manufacturing. H2O.ai is a leading player in the run to get enterprises comfortable with the AI revolution.

H2O.ai’s Offerings

Founded in 2012 by Cliff Click and Satish Ambati, Mountain View-based H2O.ai is an AI cloud company working to democratize AI for everyone, allowing customers to use its H2O AI Hybrid Cloud platform to rapidly solve complex business problems. H2O.ai began as a group of open source focused individuals who were driven by the idea that there should be freedom around the creation and use of AI. Today, its customers use the H2O AI Hybrid Cloud platform to build, operate and innovate AI solutions to solve complex business problems.

H2O.ai’s open source framework known as H2O allows data scientists and developers access to a fast machine learning engine for their applications. It works both on top of existing big data infrastructure, on bare metal or on top of existing Hadoop, Spark or Kubernetes clusters and is able to ingest data directly from HDFS, Spark, S3, Azure Data Lake or any other data source into its in-memory distributed key-value store.

Engineers can build customized applications on this framework and also use H2O.ai’s proprietary tools for certain use cases like fraud detection, churn prediction, anomaly detection, price optimization, and credit scoring. For some cases, H2O.ai’s tools act as replacement for mundane tasks, whereas in others, its tools supplement what human analysts and data scientists do. Overall, the company has 45 pre-designed applications for its pool of over 20,000 enterprise customers.

Recently, H2O.ai announced the launch of H2OGPT and LLM Studio, a no-code framework. LLM Studio provides companies with a framework where users are able to choose from commercially usable code, data, and models to build a GPT for their needs. H2OGPT is H2O’s own open-source LLM, created to be plugged into commercial offerings. Users on the generative AI service have the ability to choose from a variety of open models and data sets, view response scores, flag issues, and adjust out length.

H2O.ai’s Financials

H2O.ai remains privately held and does not disclose its financials. It has raised $251.1 million in 9 rounds of funding led by Veligera Capital, 2Shares, Goldman Sachs, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Crane Venture Partners, Pivot Investment Partners, New York Life Insurance, NVIDIA, Celesta Capital, and Wells Fargo. Its most recent round was held in November 2021, where it raised $100 million at a valuation of $1.6 billion.

With AI being such a fast-paced growth market, H2O.ai is facing competition from all fronts. Bigger players like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft already have their AI tools for the market. Other players like Databricks, DataRobot, and Kyras are other popular alternatives to tools that H2O.ai offers.

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