H2O.ai closes $100 million in funding led by Commonwealth Bank of Australia

H2O.ai, the AI cloud company, today announced it has closed $100 million in Series E fund led by Australia’s largest bank, Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA). H2O.ai has now raised over $250 million and is valued at $1.7 billion.

Pivot Investment Partners joins prior investors Goldman Sachs Asset Management and Crane Venture Partners. Existing investors include customers and partners such as Wells Fargo, New York Life and NVIDIA.

20,000 organisations, millions of data scientists, and half of the Fortune 500 trust H2O.ai as their AI provider. The company has a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 78— the highest in the industry. The capital will be used to scale partnerships, sales, marketing, and customer success globally.

Founded by Sri Satish Ambati, H2O.ai is headquartered in the San Francisco and has development center in India. The company will use the fund raised to also expand its India data and science team. Nexus Venture Partner holds a significant stake in the company.

Sri Ambati, founder and CEO of H2O.ai said, “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. 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. This will be fun.”

Matt Comyn, Commonwealth Bank of Australia CEO, said: “Commonwealth Bank processes and makes decisions based on millions of data points collected every day. 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.”

Andrew McMullan, PhD, Chief Data and Analytics Officer of CBA, joins the H2O.ai Board of Directors. H2O.ai and CBA have also entered a strategic partnership to further boost CBA’s AI capabilities, co-create financial services AI applications powered by the H2O AI Cloud and together work on initiatives to improve communities and the planet.

The rapid adoption of the H2O AI Cloud has accelerated the company’s growth. Launched in January 2021, the H2O AI Cloud brings all of H2O.ai’s products together on a single, unified platform. Designed to support H2O.ai’s core mission of democratizing AI, the H2O AI Cloud simplifies making responsible AI that users can trust, operating it efficiently and innovating with pre-built AI applications.

CBA is also participating in H2O.ai’s AI 4 Good initiatives, and recently announced the launch of the H2O.ai Wildfire and Bushfire Challenge, a global hackathon challenge to help reduce the economic and climate impact of wildfires and bushfires.