Dataiku Inc., a startup that provides a software platform for building artificial intelligence models, has closed a $100 million investment led by the growth equity firm Stripes.

Stripes was joined by Who’s Who of other institutional backers in the round, which was announced today. The group included Alphabet Inc.’s CapitalG startup investment arm, Battery Ventures, Iconiq Capital and others.

In the enterprise, deploying an AI model is a complex process that involves multiple steps ranging from data cleansing to infrastructure configuration. Dataiku’s namesake AI development platform enables machine learning teams to perform all those tasks in a centralized environment. Centralizing operations this way, the startup says, improves collaboration between employees and allows organizations to more effectively control the development environment.

Dataiku’s feature set checks a lot of boxes. For the initial phase of a machine learning project, the platform provides tools that help engineers prepare the data with which they’ll train their model and remove erroneous records. Afterwards, they can build their neural network using one of several open-source AI frameworks supported by Dataiku. The platform also offers features that automate the deployment of models and help monitor those models for issues once they’re in production.

“You don’t want people operating in a Wild West in the ML and data science space,” Will Nowak, a solutions architect at Dataiku, explained in an interview on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE studio last year. “Having a centralized platform like Dataiku where you can say, ‘This is where we’re going to [have] our central model repository.’ That’s something where businesses … can sleep easier at night because they know where [their] ML development is happening.”

Dataiku’s value proposition has helped it win over more than 300 customers, including major enterprises such as General Electric Co., Comcast Corp. and Unilever PLC, among others. That’s despite fierce competition from a large number of other venture-backed startups focused on easing AI development. Some players, such as DotData Inc., offer an end-to-end set of development tools like Dataiku, while others such as Microsoft Corp.-backed Pachyderm Inc. offer more specialized feature sets.

Dataiku is one of the better-funded startups in this market segment, having raised about $247 million to date. Chief Executive Officer Florian Douetteau told Forbes that the startup closed its latest $100 million round at a unicorn valuation but didn’t share a specific number. Dataiku was previously valued at $1.4 billion after a secondary round last December. 

Photo: Dataiku