Dataiku Inc., the maker of a data science platform targeted at artificial intelligence development, said it raised $400 million in a Series E funding round that boosts its valuation to $4.6 billion. That brings the company’s total funding to more than $646 million from 17 investors, including Alphabet Inc.’s CapitalG LF venture fund and Snowflake Ventures, the investment arm of cloud data warehousing giant Snowflake Inc.

Dataiku’s platform is used to create and train machine learning models. Founded in 2013, the company boasts 750 employees and more than 450 customers, including 150 that have signed on in the past year, including Unilever PLC, Pfizer Inc., Cisco Systems Inc.,  Johnson & Johnson, and Schlumberger N.V.

The company has attracted attention for its use of prebuilt components that cut development times and features that provide for consistent management and governance across teams and projects. The management features are particularly important to large enterprises, many of which are struggling with fragmented AI development initiatives in such areas as fraud detection, customer churn prevention, predictive maintenance and supply chain optimization.

A feature in the company’s platform called AutoML matches algorithms to data using a prebuilt library of AI models and open-source frameworks. It offers tools that data scientists can use to customize neural networks and helps optimize configuration settings. It also provides a variety of ways for data scientists to test different models to speed up development.

Dataiku has also advanced a concept it calls Everyday AI that makes it possible for business users to build functional applications without requiring a data science background. In June, the company introduced a managed cloud edition that eliminates much of the setup and configuration overhead.

“If you’re the most sophisticated applied math Ph.D. there is, Dataiku is a great environment for you to code and build predictive models. If you never built a machine learning model before, you can use Dataiku to run visual machine learning recipes,” said Will Nowak, director of sales engineering at Dataiku, in a 2019 interview on the CUBE, theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio. For enterprise customers, “It’s helping upskill their user base,” he said.

“An AI strategy in which data is a part of day-to-day operations can have large-scale impact for organizations and Dataiku is well-positioned to continue to help the enterprise realize this potential value given both the strength of their technology and the team,” said John Curtius, a partner at Tiger Global Management LLC, which led the latest funding round.

Dataiku previously raised $100 million in a Series D round last August. New investors this time include Insight Venture Partners LP, Eurazeo SE, Lightrock LLP and Olivier Pomel, CEO of cloud monitoring service Datadog Inc.

Photo: Dataiku