Dataiku raises $400M to democratize AI in the enterprise

Dataiku, an enterprise-focused platform that helps data analysts, scientists, among other non-coder employees build their own predictive AI models and garner insights from unstructured data, has raised $400 million in a series E round of funding at a $4.6 billion valuation.

Founded in 2013, Dataiku is pitched as an end-to-end platform for designing, deploying, and managing AI and analytics applications, with data connectors for sources such as Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, Google Cloud Storage, Snowflake, and NoSQL/SQL databases.

The New York-based company said that it helps “democratize AI” for enterprise clients across industries, including Unilever, Westpac, OVH, NXP Merck, and Ubisoft, which use the platform to optimize their supply chain, reduce customer churn, detect fraud, and more.

AI insights

Businesses across the spectrum have increasingly leveraged AI to bring greater intelligence to their decision-making process, but developing and training AI and machine learning models is a resource-intensive process requiring specialist skillsets. Dataiku and similar platforms help companies reduce their dependency on specialized in-house data scientists to let any team become AI creators, rather than AI consumers.

Earlier this year, Dataiku launched a slew of new tools to help companies reduce their dependency on data science teams, including the ability to run “what-if” AI model simulations to predict the outcome of any changes they make to a specific piece data. And back in June, Dataiku launched a fully-managed hosted online analytics service to minimize companies’ IT expenditure. Starting at $499 per month, the fully-managed service does most of the heavy-lifting, which might help smaller companies with fewer resources, or bigger firms seeking to bolster their existing data science team.

Prior to now, Dataiku had raised around $250 million across several rounds of funding dating back eight years, its most recent being its $100 million series D round last year. Its latest series E round was led by Tiger Global, with participation from Alphabet’s CapitalG,  Snowflake Ventures, Insight Partners, Iconiq Growth, Battery Ventures, FirstMark Capital, among others.

Dataiku’s raise comes hot on the heels of a number of major funding rounds in the space, including Databricks which raised $1 billion at a $28 billion valuation back in February, and Datarobot which secured $300 at a $6.3 billion valuation last week.