H2O.ai Raises $100M In Funding Round Led By Australia’s Largest Bank

The relationship with Commonwealth Bank of Australia includes the financial institution’s expanded use of H2O.ai’s AI and machine learning software for a number of strategic development initiatives.

Cloud AI technology developer H20.ai has raised $100 million in a Series E round of funding, boosting the company’s total financing to more than $250 million and raising its valuation to $1.7 billion.

H2O.ai, based in Mountain View, Calif., said it plans to use the additional capital to “scale partnerships, sales, marketing and customer success globally.”

The funding round was led by Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Australia’s largest bank, along with Pivot Investment Partners and existing investors Goldman Sachs Asset Management and Crane Venture Partners.

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“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,” said H2O.ai founder and CEO Sri Ambati (pictured) in a statement. “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.”

In addition to being an investor, Commonwealth Bank is an H2O.ai customer and the two companies said they have entered a strategic partnership through which CBA will expand its use of H2O.ai software to boost the bank’s AI capabilities and co-create financial service AI applications powered by H2O AI Cloud.

“Commonwealth Bank processes and makes decisions based on millions of data points collected every day,” said Matt Comyn, the bank’s CEO, in a statement.

“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,” Comyn said.

Andrew McMullan, the banks chief data and analytics officer, is joining the H2O.ai board of directors.

H2O.ai said it is seeing rapid adoption of the H2O AI Cloud, launched in January, which brings the company’s artificial intelligence and machine learning products together on a unified cloud platform.

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia also said it will work with H2O.ai on “initiatives to improve communities and the planet,” including H2O’ai’s AI 4 Good initiative and the vendor’s recently launched H20.ai Wildfire and Bushfire Challenge, a global hackathon to help reduce the economic and climate impact of wildfires and bushfires.