Silicon Valley-based H2O.ai, an enterprise startup co-founded by Indian-origin entrepreneur SriSatish Ambati, has raised $40 million (about Rs 258 crore) in a Series C round led by banking and financial services company Wells Fargo and technology firm NVIDIA, a press statement said.
Existing investor Nexus Venture Partners also put in money. New York Life, Crane Venture Partners and Transamerica Ventures, the corporate venture capital fund of Transamerica and Aegon Group, were the other investors.
The Series C round takes the total funding raised by H2O.ai to $75 million, the statement said.
The company will use the funds to advance its machine learning efforts, and for global expansion and innovation of Driverless AI, an automated machine learning and pipelining platform.
"AI is eating both hardware and software," said Ambati, who is also chief executive of H2O.ai. "Billions of devices are generating unprecedented amounts of data, which truly calls for distributed machine learning that is ubiquitous and fast," he added.
Founded by Ambati and Cliff Click in 2011, H2O.ai has partnered NVIDIA and IBM to enhance machine learning, and teamed up with Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure to bring its machine learning platform to the public cloud.
The startup has also co-founded a graphics processing unit (GPU) initiative with NVIDIA to create an ecosystem for data developers and researchers.
"AI is an incredible force that’s sweeping across the technology landscape... H2O.ai's use of GPU-accelerated AI provides powerful tools for customers," said Jeff Herbst, vice president of business development at NVIDIA.
AI and machine learning startups have attracted a lot of investor interest of late.
Bangalore-based Boxx.ai had raised $500,000 from Mumbai-based venture capital firm Unicorn India Ventures and a clutch of investors in June this year.
Vernacular.ai, which offers a multilingual AI platform for businesses, had raised an undisclosed amount from KStart Capital, the seed programme run by venture capital firm Kalaari Capital, in May.
In February, Botworx.ai, a conversational commerce platform, raised $3 million in seed investment led by California-based venture capital firm Costanoa Ventures, with support from San Francisco-based angel investment firm S V Angel.