DataRobot Acquires Self-Service Data Preparation Solution, Paxata

December 12, 2019
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· 2 min read

Back in 2012, Harvard Business Review called data scientists “the sexiest job of the 21st century.” That may or may not be true, but I do believe that one of the hardest jobs in the latter half of this decade is that of the executive responsible for developing and implementing AI strategy in the enterprise. It’s a difficult job for a number of reasons. For one, odds are not in their favor with >90% of AI executives claiming to have problems with model development and deployment. Also, they’re experiencing a tremendous shortage of talent, and they have to make vendor and technology decisions in a sea of endless point solutions and confusing vendor claims.

To resolve these issues and deliver on the value of AI to the enterprise, we have a singular focus on building an AI platform that provides unprecedented levels of automation across every AI task required to go from raw data to ROI. We have made tremendous progress in delivering on this vision through organic and inorganic efforts. In a previous release, we announced broad end-to-end capabilities: an AI Catalog which was developed as a result of our acquisition of Cursor, Automated Feature Engineering which significantly outperforms other similar solutions, and our newly launched MLOps product (based on our ParallelM acquisition) to enable customers to deploy and manage models in production. We now have a proven track record of leveraging and successfully integrating acquisitions to help us deliver on this vision.

However, we have repeatedly heard from our customers that they wanted us to deliver one additional key capability, which was to significantly simplify how they prepare data required for AI. We have listened and I am very pleased to announce that DataRobot has acquired Paxata to help fulfill our mission of building the world’s first automated, end-to-end AI platform. This is our fifth and largest acquisition since 2017.

I first met Prakash Nanduri, founder and CEO of Paxata, shortly after he and his co-founders started the company in 2012. A few years later, I led Intel Capital investment in the company and had the honor to serve on the Board of the company for several years. After searching far and wide for the best solution that could help us address this critical need for our customers, and after both teams spent a significant amount of time together talking about our joint vision for the future of enterprise AI, it became apparent that the Paxata team was best aligned with us across our product and technology vision, as well as our culture and values. We believe we have a differentiated vision for what data preparation for AI should be and we look forward to executing on this vision together with Paxata team.

We couldn’t be more excited to welcome Prakash Nanduri, Dave Brewster, Nenshad Bardoliwalla, Chris Maddox, and the entire Paxata team to DataRobot to start working together on delivering massive value to our customers.

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About the author
Igor Taber

Igor Taber is the SVP of Corporate Development and Strategy at DataRobot. Prior to joining DataRobot, Igor was an investor and board observer of the company. He was also Managing Director at Intel Capital, responsible for data analytics and AI investments. Igor received a BS in Computer Science from The University of Kansas and has an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania – The Wharton School.

Meet Igor Taber
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