Goldman Sachs, China's Ping An back artificial intelligence firm H20.ai - Reuters

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Goldman Sachs Group Inc, China's Ping An Global Voyager Fund and others have invested $72.5 million in H20.ai, a rapidly growing artificial intelligence startup, the companies said on Tuesday. Founded in 2012, California-based H20.ai is a software company that aims to make it easier for companies that lack the skilled workforce or time to adapt to the rapidly changing artificial intelligence landscape, Chief Executive and founder Sri Ambati said in an interview. Customers like Capital One Financial Corp, Wells Fargo & Co, Aetna and Booking.com can use H20's platform to automate model building, feature engineering and to pull valuable insights out of large amounts of the companies' proprietary data, Ambati said. H20 gives customers "recipes" to use that automate the entire process of building, training and deploying models, or it will help a company's own employees to create their tailored models. "Our mission is to make our customers AI companies ... and (to reduce) the barrier for new data scientists to produce great models," Ambati said.