DataRobot, the Boston-based enterprise AI company that hit unicorn status last September after a $207 million Series E round, has brought in another massive fundraise: $270 million in what the startup is calling a "pre-IPO round" led by Altimeter Capital.
Other participating investors include T. Rowe Price, Blackrock, Silverlake, NEA and Tiger.
The new funding brings DataRobot's valuation to $2.7 billion, the company said in a statement. DataRobot SVP of Corporate Development and Strategy Igor Taber repeatedly hinted that DataRobot is eyeing an IPO, calling going public a "possibility" for the eight-year-old company, although he declined to discuss specifics.
"The goal is to build a long-term, iconic company," he said. "IPO is something that might happen, but we don't have a timeline for it, and that's not the goal in itself."
Taber did, however, point to similarities between DataRobot and another data warehousing company, Snowflake. Snowflake shattered records in September by raising nearly $3.4 billion in the largest software IPO to date, valuing the company at $33.2 billion. One of the biggest winners in that IPO: Altimeter Capital, which had the second-largest stake in Snowflake and is now the lead investor on DataRobot's new round.
And as Taber noted, DataRobot has partnered with Snowflake since February, when it launched an integration that allowed users to read data in Snowflake, create predictions in DataRobot, then send those decisions back to Snowflake seamlessly.
"Altimeter recognized there is a significant amount of synergies between the value proposition of Snowflake and the value proposition of DataRobot," Taber said. "Customers are increasingly benefiting, using our product together through our existing partnership. Probably one of the reasons Altimeter was excited about investing in the company was because of that synergy."
Taber said the funding will be used to hire globally; DataRobot has offices in Singapore, Japan and Ukraine, as well as elsewhere in the U.S. The team does not plan to focus on any one vertical but will broadly pursue growth in engineering, product and go-to-market.
The round also comes eight months after DataRobot made significant layoffs, which the startup told BostInno affected employees "across business areas and regions."
"At the beginning of the year, there was a bit of uncertainty given the Covid impact and the impact it would have on every business, including us," Taber said. "As we're going on through the year, what we've seen is really strong continued growth of the business. We decided it was a good time for us to raise additional capital to continue accelerating our growth."
