DataRobot buys adaptive data preparation startup Paxata to bolster its AI capabilities

Enterprise artificial-intelligence platform company DataRobot has reached a deal to acquire Paxata, an analytics and AI startup that provides the first adaptive data preparation platform built for the analyst to turn raw data into ready data for analytics. The financial terms weren’t disclosed. The deal, which is expected to be completed within the next two weeks, will help DataRobot closes a gap in the company’s offerings, according to the company executive.

As part of the acquisition, all of Paxata’s nearly 100 employees, including Prakash Nanduri, its chief executive and co-founder, will join DataRobot, which now has a workforce of about 1,100. Founded in 2012 by Prakash Nanduri, Chris Maddox, Dave Brewster, and Nenshad Bardoliwalla, Paxata’s platform provides an interactive, analyst-centric data prep experience powered by a unified set of technologies designed from the ground up for comprehensive data integration, data quality, semantic enrichment, collaboration and governance.

While the massive impact of AI on enterprises is well understood – PwC forecasts by 2030 AI could contribute $15.7 trillion to the global economy – companies must overcome several key challenges associated with AI in order to reap the benefits and become successful. Data preparation is one area that has historically held companies back. Creating a dataset for training predictive models, deploying data prep steps with AI models, and preparing data specific to AI routines are all major challenges companies face when it comes to leveraging data at scale.

By providing tools that help users build automation into their data prep processes, the Paxata acquisition will alleviate these pain points for customers and dramatically enhance their ability to achieve AI-driven outcomes rapidly. Further, as enterprises move to a multi-cloud, hybrid world, it is imperative that an underlying data fabric that combines enterprise scale, security, and governance is a core part of the enterprise AI infrastructure.

“Data prep for AI has been a long-standing challenge for AI projects,” said Jeremy Achin, CEO and Co-founder, DataRobot. “With the addition of the AI-enabled data prep and enterprise data fabric solution from Paxata, we will now give business users the industry’s most complete enterprise-class platform to automate the AI lifecycle from start to finish.”

Paxata’s platform, built on Apache Spark and optimized to run in Hadoop environments, leverages distributed computing, machine learning and a dynamically visual workspace that promotes transparent governance and ad hoc collaboration. Paxata data prep, powered by IntelliFusion™, is designed to eliminate the need for coding, scripting and sampling. The solution is available as a service, and can be deployed in AWS virtual private clouds or within Hadoop environments at customer sites.

DataRobot was founded in 2012 by Jeremy Achin and Thomas DeGodoy. The Boston, Massachusetts-based DataRobot offers a machine learning platform for data scientists of all skill levels to build and deploy accurate predictive models in a fraction of the time it used to take. The technology addresses the critical shortage of data scientists by changing the speed and economics of predictive analytics.

The DataRobot platform uses massively parallel processing to train and evaluate 1000’s of models in R, Python, Spark MLlib, H2O and other open-source libraries. It searches through millions of possible combinations of algorithms, pre-processing steps, features, transformations, and tuning parameters to deliver the best models for your dataset and prediction target.