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H2O.ai Embarks on Global Expansion to Drive AI Democratization

Company Expands into Key Markets in EMEA and APAC, Strengthens Leadership Team with New Global Sales Leader

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – July 10, 2018 – H2O.ai, the open source leader in AI, today announced that it is expanding operations into several key regions and cities around the world, including London, Prague, Australia, Brazil and China to further support the growing data science community in these regions and demonstrate H2O.ai’s commitment to democratizing AI for everyone across the globe. Additionally, the company announced the appointment of David Armstrong as its new SVP Global Sales to support this global expansion by continuing to strengthen H2O.ai’s enterprise go-to-market strategy and accelerate company growth.

To meet growing global demand for AI, H2O.ai has opened a European AI Research Center of Excellence in Prague with a team dedicated to driving high velocity in product innovation as the company continues to scale rapidly. The development and research efforts in Prague will also support company expansion in EMEA, where the team continues to build relationships with some of the region’s largest financial and banking organizations, including building a presence in London.

“AI is changing the way we work at Barclays, from how we manage our risk to, most importantly, how we meet our clients’ ever-changing financial needs,” said John Stecher, Chief Innovation Officer at Barclays. “We look to ensure that we’re leveraging the best of breed AI platforms like H2O.ai, hardware and techniques, focusing on melding them together with our deep industry expertise, to deliver innovative financial solutions that move our clients and us forward.”

In addition to opening up offices in London and Prague, H2O.ai is expanding its presence into China. In November 2017, the company announced its $40 million Series C funding round with participation from leading financial services firms, including Barclays and Beijing-based Fintech conglomerate, CreditEase, which is committed to helping the company establish a strong presence in China.

“H2O.ai is at the forefront of cutting-edge innovation in the AI space. They have built user-friendly tools that enable using AI for practical applications in a scalable way across large organizations. They already have several financial services clients such as Capital One and PayPal,” said Anju Patwardhan, Managing Director at CreditEase Fintech Investment Fund. “We believe in H2O.ai’s mission to democratize AI and expect it to grow rapidly beyond the North American and European markets to China and the rest of Asia.”

In both EMEA and APAC specifically, H2O.ai is committed to connecting the region’s large population of data science, machine learning and AI professionals. To accomplish this, the company has hosted a number of successful meetups in the regions, with over 15,000 participants joining in EMEA, including nearly 6,000 in London alone.

“H2O is a global open source machine learning movement with world-wide usage and our community of customers need a global organization to serve their AI needs,” said Sri Ambati, CEO and founder at H2O.ai. “We are excited to announce our expansion into London and our European AI Research Center of Excellence in Prague to bring our AI and maker culture to our partners in UK and EMEA. Barclays and CreditEase extend our networks in England and China with their global connectivity and reach.”

Leadership Team Expands to Support Global Demand

With over 20 years of experience in leading sales and business development teams at pre-IPO and publicly-traded software companies, David Armstrong joins the H2O.ai team with a strong track record of overachieving against revenue targets and building winning sales teams.  Armstrong has served as the Vice-President of Business Development at Autonomy, where he built Autonomy’s indirect channels and delivered significant revenue in the runup to their successful IPO. Armstrong then held a variety of sales management positions at Actuate Corporation, including worldwide VP and GM of the open source BIRT sales team. Most recently, he was responsible for worldwide Analytics, AI and OEM sales at OpenText, a leading enterprise information management software company where he was a member of the Senior Leadership Team.

“H2O.ai is constantly innovating, bringing the latest in AI to the enterprise. They’re the clear leader in the space and have the potential to grow exponentially,” said Armstrong. “The company’s commitment to making easy-to-use AI available to all is a huge win for customers and definitely resonates with me. I’m excited to be on the team as we drive our growth strategy forward.”

“Our reseller, technology and OEM partnerships bring H2O AI to a global audience in need of products that solve business problems. I’m very excited to have David Armstrong on our side to strengthen our movement and take our innovation to the global markets,” Ambati said.

AI for the Global Enterprise

These milestones are the latest in a long list of recent achievements for H2O.ai as the company continues to accelerate its commercial expansion and strengthen its position as a thought leader and innovator, including raising its $40 million Series C funding, continuously releasing new innovations for its  enterprise-ready platform, Driverless AI, for automatic machine learning and foster further adoption and trust in artificial intelligence. In addition, H2O.ai has been named a leader in the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Science and Machine Learning Platforms. H2O.ai’s portfolio of products, including H2O Driverless AI and its open source platform H2O, are used by 222 of the Fortune 500 and 14,000 organizations around the world.

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About H2O.ai

H2O.ai is the open source leader in AI. Its mission is to democratize AI for all. H2O.ai is transforming the use of AI with software with its category-creating visionary open source machine learning platform, H2O. More than 12,600 companies use open-source H2O in mission-critical use cases for Finance, Insurance, Healthcare, Retail, Telco, Sales, and Marketing. H2O.ai recently launched Driverless AI that uses AI to do AI in order to provide an easier, faster and effective means of implementing data science. In February 2018, Gartner named H2O.ai, as a Leader in the 2018 Magic Quadrant for Data Science and Machine Learning Platforms. H2O.ai partners with leading technology companies such as NVIDIA, IBM, AWS, Azure and Google and is proud of its growing customer base which includes Capital One, Progressive Insurance, Comcast, Walgreens and PayPal. For more information and to learn more about how H2O.ai is transforming business processes with intelligence, visit www.h2o.ai.

Media Contact:
Erika Kamholz
press@h2o.ai
949-282-8560