(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a Cube conversation. >> Everyone, welcome to this special Cube conversation here in Palo Alto Cube studios. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. We have special breaking news here, with Sri Ambati who is the founder and CEO of H2O.ai with big funding news. Great to see you Cube alumni, hot startup, you got some hot funding news, share with us. >> We are very excited to announce our Series D. Goldman Sachs, one of our leading customers and Ping An from China are leading our round. It's a round of $72 million, and bringing our total fundraise to 147. This is an endorsement of their support of our mission to democratize AI and an endorsement of the amazing teamwork behind the company and its customer centricity. Customers have now come to lead two of our rounds. Last round was Series C led by Wells Fargo and NVIDIA and I think it just goes to say how critical a thing we are for their success in AI. >> Well congratulations, I've been watching you guys build this company from scratch, we've had many conversations going back to 2013, '14 on The Cube. You call it-- >> You covered us long before. >> You guys were always on the wave, and you really created a category, this is a new category that Cloud 2.0 is creating which is a DevOps mindset, entrepreneurial mindset, creating a category to enable people to have the kind of infrastructure and tooling and software to enable them to do all the heavy lifting of AI without doing the heavy lifting. As the quote for cloud is, that Amazon always quotes is you do all of the undifferentiated heavy lifting that's required to stand up stuff and then provide tooling for the heavy differentiated lifting to make it easy to use. This has been a key thing. Has that been the-- >> Customers have be core to our, company building. H2O is here to build an amazing piece of innovation and technology and innovation is not new for Silicon Valley, as you know. But I think innovation, with a purpose and with a focus of customer success is something we represent and that's been kind of the key north finder for us. In terms of making things simpler, when we started, it was a grassroots movement in open source and we wanted the mind share of millions of users worldwide and that mind share got us a lot of feedback. And that feedback is how we then built the second generation of the product lines, which is driverless AI. We are also announcing our mission to make every company an AI company, this funding will power that transformation of several businesses that can then go on to build the AI superpower. >> And certainly, cloud computing, more compute more elastic resources is always a great tailwind. What are you guys going to do with the funding in terms of focus? >> You mentioned cloud which is a great story. We're obviously going to make things easier for folks who are doing the cloud, but they are the largest players, as well, Google, Microsoft, Amazon. They're right there, trying to innovate. AI is at the center of every software moment because AI eating software, software is eating the world. And so, all the software players are right there, trying to build a large AI opportunity for the world and we think in ecosystems, not just empires. So our mission is to uplift the entire AI to the place where businesses can use it, verticalize it, build new products, globalize. We are building our sales and marketing efforts now with a much bigger, faster systems-- >> So a lot of, go to market expansion, more customer focus. More field sales and support kind of thing. >> Build our center for AI research in Prague, within the CND, now we are building it in Chennai and Ottawa, and so globalizing the operation, going to China, going to build focus in Asia as well. >> So nice step up on funding at 72 million, you said? >> 72.5 million. >> 72.5 million, that's almost double what you've raised to date, nice kickup. So global expansion, nice philosophy. That's important to you guys, isn't it? >> The world has become a small village. There's no changing that, and data is global. Things are a wide global trend, it's amazing to see that AI is not just transforming the US, it's also transforming China, it's also transforming India. It's transforming Africa. Pay through mobile is a very common theme worldwide and I think data is being collected globally. I think there is no way to unbox it and box it back to a small place, so our vision is very borderless and global and we want the AI companies of the valley to also compete in a global arena and I think that's kind of why we think it's important to be-- >> Love competition, that's certainly going to force everyone to be more open. I got to ask you about the role of the developer. I love the democratization, putting AI in the hands of everybody, it's a great mission. You guys do a lot of AI for Good efforts. So congratulations on that, but how does this change the nature of the developer, because you're seeing with cloud and DevOps, developers are becoming closer to the front lines, they're becoming kingmakers. They're becoming really, really important. So the role of the developer is important. How do you change that role, if any. How do you expand it, what happens? >> There are two important transformations happening right now in the tech world. One is the role of data scientists and the role of the software engineer. Right, so they're coming closer in many ways, in actually in some of the newer places, software engineers are deploying data science models, data scientists are deploying software engineering. So Python has been a good new language, the new languages that are coming up that help that happen more closely. Software engineering as we know it, which was looking at data creating the rules and the logic that runs a program is now being automated to a degree where that logic is being generated from data using data science. So that's where the brains behind how programs run how computers build is now being, is AI inside. And so that's where the world is transforming, software engineers now get to do a lot more with a lot less of tinkering on a daily basis for little modules. They can probably build a whole slew of an application what would take 18 months to build is now compressing into 18 weeks or 18 days. >> Sri, I love how you talk about software engineering and data scientists, very specific. I was having a debate with my young son around what is computer science was the question. Well, computer science is the study of computers the science of computers. It used to be if you were a CS or a comp sci major which is not cool to say anymore but, when you were a computer science major, you were really a software engineer, that was the discipline. Now, computer science as a field has spread so far and so broad, you've got software engineering you've got data science, you have newer roles are emerging. But that brings up the question I want to put to you which is, the whole idea of, I'm a full stack developer. Well, if what you're saying you're doing is true, you're essentially cutting the stack in half. So it's a half stack developer on one end and a data scientist that's got the other half. So the notion of the full stack developer kind of goes away with the idea of horizontally scalable infrastructure and vertically specialized data and AI. Your thoughts, what's your reaction to that? >> I think the most... I would say the most scarce resource in the world is empathy, right? When developers have empathy for their users, they now start building design that cares for the users. So the design becomes still the limiting factor where you can't really automate a lot of that design. So the full stack engineer is now going closer to the front and understanding their users and making applications that are perceptive of how the users are using them and building that empathy into the product. A lot of the full stack, we used to learn how to build up a kernel, deploy it on cloud, scale it on your own servers. All of that is coming together in reasonably easier ways. With cloud is helping there, AI is helping there, data is helping there, and lessons from the data. But I think what has not gone away is imagination, creativity, and how to power that creativity with AI and get it in the hands of someone quickly. Marketing has become easier in the new world. So it's not just enough to make products, you have to make markets for your products and then deliver and get that success for customers-- >> So what you're saying-- >> The developers become-- >> The consistency of the lower end of the stack of wiring together the plumbing and the kernel and everything else is done for you. So you can move up. >> Up the stack. >> So the stack's growing, so it's still kind of full. No one calls themselves a half stack developer. I haven't met anyone say "Yeah I'm a half stack developer." They're full stack developers, but the roles are changing. >> I think what-- >> There's more to do on the front end of creativity so the stack's extending. >> Creativity is changing, I think the one thing we have learned. We've gone past Moore's Law in the valley and people are innovating architectures to run AI faster. So AI is beginning to eat hardware. So you've seen the transformation in microprocessors as well I think once AI starts being part of the overall conversation, you'll see a much more richer coexistence with being how a human programmer and a computer programmer is going to be working closely. But I think this is just the beginning of a real richness when you talk about rich interactive applications, you're going to talk about rich interactive appliances, where you start seeing intelligence really spread around the form. >> Sri, if we really want to have some fun we can just talk about what a 10x engineer is. No I'm only kidding, we're not going to go there. It's always a good debate on Twitter what a 10x engineer is. Sri, congratulations on the funding. $72.5 million in finance for global expansion on the team side as well as in geographies, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> H2O.ai >> The full stack engineer of the future is, finishing up your full stack engineer conversation is going to get that courage and become a leader. Going from managers to leaders, developers to founders. I think it's become easier to democratize entrepreneurship now than ever before and part of our mission as a company is to democratize things, democratize AI, democratize H2O like in the AI for Good, democratize water. But also democratize the art of making more entrepreneurs and remove the common ways to fail and that's also a way to create more opportunity more ownership in the world and so-- >> And I think society will benefit from this globally because in the data is truth, in the data is the notion of being transparent, if it's all there and we're going to get to the data faster and that's where AI helps us. >> That's what it is. >> Sri, congratulations, $72 million of funding for H2O. We're here with the founder and CEO Sri Ambati. Great success story here in Silicon Valley and around the world. I'm John Furrier with the Cube, thanks for watching. >> Sri: Thank you. (upbeat music)