US-based machine learning services provider H2O.ai has raised $8.9m in series A funding from backers including Transamerica Ventures, the corporate venturing arm of insurance company Transamerica.
The round was co-led by Rakesh Matur, chief executive of India-based online retailer Junglee, Michael Marks, founding partner at Riverwood Capital, and Ash Bhardwaj, formerly the CEO of contract manufacturer Flextronics, and also included venture firm Nexus Venture Partners.
Nexus previously led H2O’s $1.7m seed round in 2012.
H2O, which changed its name from 0xdata in conjunction with the funding, provides big data machine learning which can analyse up to four billion database entries per second. Its customers include Cisco, Nielsen and PayPal.
Lou Carvalheira, principal data scientist of Cisco, said: “[H2O.ai chief executive SriSatish Ambati] and the H2O team’s commitment to advancing the machine learning community is an inspiration to our industry. Their vision to scale machine learning to power intelligent applications aligns with Cisco’s focus on advancing the human network.”