As a sign of how the company has been growing, and the general appetite for what it does, H2O’s valuation has leapfrogged since that last round, when it was valued at $400 million, per PitchBook data. The company has offered an open source component to its services, which it calls simply H2O, from its earliest days, and that is now used by over 20,000 enterprises. Now, it has raised $100 million to fuel its growth, a round of funding that values H2O.ai at $1.7 billion post-money ($1.6 billion pre-money). Part of the reason for that is its flexibility: H2O.ai says that its open source framework works both on top of existing big data infrastructure, on bare metal or on top of existing Hadoop, Spark or Kubernetes clusters and is able to ingest data directly from HDFS, Spark, S3, Azure Data Lake or any other data source into it’s in-memory distributed key-value store.“Our open source platform gives freedom and ability for customers to build their own AI centers of competence and excellence,” Ambati said of the open source tools. H2O.ai is not the first or only startup that has aimed to fill this gap in the market, although it seems to have managed its task a little more successfully than others.