Hewlett Packard Enterprise has acquired Determined AI, an open source machine learning (ML) platform that aligns with HPE's high performance computing (HPC) strategy and GreenLake hybrid cloud managed services. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
This is technology M&A deal number 348 that ChannelE2E has covered so far in 2021. See all technology M&A deals for 2021 and 2020 listed here.
The announcement surfaced as the HPE Discover 2021 virtual conference kicks off for partners and customers.
Determined AI Business Background, Potential HPE Synergies
Determined AI was founded in 2017. By 2019, the company raised $11 million in early stage funding. Financial backers at the time included GV (formerly Google Ventures), VentureBeat notes. By 2020, the company launched an open source platform and began to focus the machine learning software on biopharmaceuticals, autonomous vehicles, defense contracting, and manufacturing.
The Determined AI team, which has 29 employees listed on LinkedIn, will tuck into HPE’s HPC & Mission Critical Solutions (MCS) business group. Looking ahead, Determined AI will "enable machine learning engineers to easily implement and train machine learning models to provide faster and more accurate insights from their data in almost every industry," HPE asserts.
Potential use cases, according to HPE, include properly setting up and managing a highly parallel software ecosystem and infrastructure spanning specialized compute, storage, fabric and accelerators.
The deal also aligns with HPE GreenLake cloud services for HPC. HPE will offer the Determined AI software within managed services that can run in a customer’s data center, in a colocation or at the edge using the HPE GreenLake edge to cloud platform, the buyer said.
In a statement about the Determined AI deal, HPE did not mention whether the HPC strategy involves multi-tenant options for MSP partners.
HPE Acquires Determined AI: Executive Perspectives
In a prepared statement about the deal, Justin Hotard, senior vice president and general manager, HPC and Mission Critical Solutions (MCS), HPE, said:
“As we enter the Age of Insight, our customers recognize the need to add machine learning to deliver better and faster answers from their data. AI-powered technologies will play an increasingly critical role in turning data into readily available, actionable information to fuel this new era. Determined AI’s unique open source platform allows ML engineers to build models faster and deliver business value sooner without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. I am pleased to welcome the world-class Determined AI team, who share our vision to make AI more accessible for our customers and users, into the HPE family.”
Added Evan Sparks, CEO of Determined AI:
“The Determined AI team is excited to join HPE, who shares our vision to realize the potential of AI. Over the last several years, building AI applications has become extremely compute, data, and communication intensive. By combining with HPE’s industry-leading HPC and AI solutions, we can accelerate our mission to build cutting edge AI applications and significantly expand our customer reach.”
Track complete HPE Discover 2021 conference news here.
