DataRobot Announces Series E Funding Round

Today, we announced that we have raised $206M in Series E financing. This new capital will significantly accelerate our ability to execute on our vision of helping all organizations become AI-driven. I want to briefly summarize why we raised this additional capital and how we plan to execute on this vision.

Every major technology transition from the past 100 years has created clear category leaders, and many of these leading companies went on to become iconic enterprises. Think of Oracle’s databases, VMware’s cloud, and Salesforce’s cloud CRM. All of these companies have one thing in common: they delivered significant innovation and led broad adoption of the technologies they were championing. These companies made complex technologies accessible and efficient, and as a result, built some of history’s most successful companies.

Much has been written about the promise of AI and the “Intelligence Revolution” that will lead to a substantial performance gap between AI-driven organizations and non- or slow adopters. In the face of this enormous potential, customers are encountering multiple obstacles to capitalize on this opportunity. This is because these technologies are complex, the barriers to adoption are high, and few companies possess the required skills to succeed. There is a tremendous shortage of AI experts in the market today and many companies are facing internal challenges with implementing AI. That’s why, according to Gartner, 85% of projects have not delivered on their promises.

As with previous technology transitions, whoever can successfully remove the complexity to drive adoption will emerge as a leader. The winning AI platform will have a unique opportunity to capture enormous value and become one of the largest software companies in the world.

When our co-founders, Jeremy Achin and Tom de Godoy, started DataRobot, they set out to build such a company. They had a simple vision: to put AI in the hands of a broad set of users who have a deep understanding of the business problem, domain, and data. Automation to democratize and scale AI is the only way to achieve this vision.

How DataRobot Helps Make Winners in the AI “Arms Race”

By making the production of AI accessible through unprecedented levels of automation, DataRobot drastically increases demand and adoption. Since we started seven years ago, the market has seen a number of new market entrants (big companies and small) with aspirations to solve some of these problems. However,  offering solutions that only solve parts of the problem is not sufficient. We believe that a winning AI platform will have the following key attributes:

• Automation: Customers are looking for the automation of every aspect of AI from end-to-end: preparing data, building models, deploying and managing models in production, and building applications that are powered by these models.
• Trust: If organizations are going to rely on automated AI for decisions, they need to be confident that it is ethical, accurate, designed correctly, and not biased.
• Platform and cloud-agnostic: Customers need to be able to choose their data and compute infrastructure without rebuilding their existing AI solutions.
• Democratization: Customers want a diverse set of users with varying experience levels enabled to solve business problems.

We have made tremendous strides toward this vision over the past seven years and we’re extremely proud to offer what we believe is the most capable and mature pure-play AI platform. We have:

• Grown our business >100% annually.
• Built the best team in the industry comprising of nearly 1,000 people from across 15 countries.
• Invested 1.1M person-hours with 350+ engineers and data scientists in engineering innovation and customer success.
• Built 2.5M models daily for customers and, to date, have built 1.3B models on the DataRobot AI Platform.
• Helped hundreds of happy customers become AI-Driven, including eight out of the top 10 global banks, three of the top five largest US health insurers, two of the world’s largest retailers, and 30% of the top 50 companies in the world.
• Completed four acquisitions that enable us to accelerate our product roadmap to deliver on our end-to-end vision (including the introduction of MLOps, which was also announced today by leveraging recent ParallelM acquisition).

Despite the phenomenal successes we have achieved so far, we are early in capturing the enormous potential in front of us. That’s why we raised this additional capital — to enable us to continue building on our leadership. The ultimate advantage comes from having the best product combined with the massive global scale for distribution and customer success.

Finally, we are grateful to our new and existing investors for believing in us, we’re humbled by our customers for trusting us with their success, and we’re extremely proud of the entire DataRobot team for their continued execution and commitment to our vision.

About the Author:

Igor Taber is the SVP of Corporate Development and Strategy at DataRobot. Prior to joining DataRobot, Igor was an investor and board observer of the company. He was also Managing Director at Intel Capital, responsible for data analytics and AI investments. Igor received a BS in Computer Science from The University of Kansas and has an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania – The Wharton School.