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After raising $206m in its Series E round in September, DataRobot has made its fifth and largest purchase to date, acquiring Paxata.
Earlier this year, Boston-based enterprise AI platform DataRobot announced a massive $206m Series E raise, bringing the total raised by the company to around $430.6m.
Set up by Jeremy Achin and Thomas de Godoy in 2012, DataRobot is an automated machine learning platform that helps build and deploy accurate predictive models. Its investors include Sapphire Ventures, DFJ Growth, Geodesic Capital, Intel Capital and Sands Capital, among others.
After the latest funding round, Achin and de Godoy said they were considering potential acquisition opportunities. The company already acquired ParallelM in June and Cursor in February. DataRobot made two other acquisitions in 2017.
This week, DataRobot made its first post-fundraising acquisition, and it’s the company’s largest acquisition to date.
The target of the deal was Paxata, a California-based data preparation platform start-up that has raised a total of $86m in venture capital to date. Neither company disclosed the terms or financial details of the deal.
Automating the AI lifecycle from start to finish
In a statement, DataRobot said that the acquisition will bolster its end-to-end AI capabilities, while alleviating pain points for customers.
“Data prep for AI has been a long-standing challenge for AI projects,” Achin said. “With the addition of the AI-enabled data prep and enterprise data fabric solution from Paxata, we will now give business users the industry’s most complete enterprise-class platform to automate the AI lifecycle from start to finish.”
After announcing the acquisition, the companies unveiled a first-of-its-kind integration into DataRobot’s AI catalogue, making it easier for business analysts and data scientists to prepare data for machine learning.
In addition to the new capability, which is available from today, the teams will work together to refine and strengthen the next generation of data preparation for AI in 2020. DataRobot will also continue to support existing Paxata customers.
Ben Haines, SVP and CIO at Verizon Media, said: “Combining AI-enabled data prep from Paxata with enterprise AI capabilities from DataRobot will supercharge our ability to transform data and deliver better outcomes all within one platform.
“As a current customer of both companies, we recognise the strategic value of this acquisition and look forward to the added capabilities that the integration and new data prep offering will include.”
