Jeremy Achin worked at the insurer Travelers, where he met Tom de Godoy. Both were data scientists, and they entered Kaggle contests together as a team.
Around 2011 they placed sixth in a contest with two weeks to build a solution. They went on to a run of top-three finishes, and both ranked as high as 20th on the site. De Godoy says the idea for DataRobot came during that first contest.
They founded DataRobot in Boston in 2012. Pitching investors was hard, because many people then saw AI as science fiction. The product automated the slow work of building predictive models, so insurers, banks and agencies could run many models without a large data-science team.
In July 2021 DataRobot raised a $300 million Series G at a $6.3 billion valuation. By then Achin was gone. The board had pushed him out as CEO in March 2021, partly over his resistance to going public. By May 2022 the company had raised about $1.1 billion in total.