In March 2021 the board of DataRobot made a decision that most founders dread. Jeremy Achin, who had started the company nine years earlier and run it ever since, was out. Reporting at the time tied the move partly to a conflict over going public: Achin did not want to.
It is a strange place to end up for a man whose company had just been valued at more than double its previous round.
It is a strange place to end up for a man whose company had just been valued at more than double its previous round.
Achin and Tom de Godoy had started DataRobot in 2012, in Boston. Both had competed on Kaggle, the data science contest site, and one profile says a Kaggle competition was the real impetus for the company. Achin studied math, physics, computer science and statistics at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, according to a profile page. The founders' childhoods and families are not documented in anything found for this piece, and that gap should be said plainly.
What the record does show is the idea. Building a predictive model was slow, specialist work. Their product tried the many different approaches automatically and handed back the best. For a bank or an insurer with a hundred questions and three data scientists, that mattered.
It worked. The company bought a rival, Nutonian, in 2017. By the time CNBC listed it among its Disruptor 50 in 2022, it had raised about $1.1 billion, counted a third of the Fortune 50 as customers, reported more than a million AI projects, and had signed a five-year, $249 million Department of Defense contract. The U.S. Army used it to flag contracts likely to come in under budget, identifying nearly $2 billion that could be reallocated.
Then came the fall-out. In July 2021, four months after Achin left, a $300 million Series G valued DataRobot at $6.3 billion, with Tiger Global and Altimeter returning. Dan Wright, an operating chief from AppDynamics, had taken over in 2020; a Google cloud executive and a Tableau finance chief joined the team. De Godoy, the CTO and other founder, also left.
Since then there has been no new priced round that could be found. The $6.3 billion figure is now more than five years old, and one source says the company has been marked down without saying to what. An aggregator puts 2024 revenue at $285 million, which should be treated as unconfirmed.
The quiet lesson is about the end of the story, not the start. A founder who builds the machine may not be the person the board wants to steer it through a decision as large as going public, and the disagreement usually surfaces just when the company looks strongest. Founders who care about the timing of an exit would do well to settle that argument with their investors long before the term sheet.