DataRobot’s Former CEO Launches Two Startups And A VC Fund From Ukraine

As CEO of artificial intelligence company DataRobot until last March, Jeremy Achin prepared various contingency plans for his 1,000-plus employees, such as how to weather the pandemic’s impact on his company’s sales. But he never had to prepare for a full-scale war, as he has been doing since he landed in Ukraine two weeks ago to support his new ventures there.

Noting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s massing of troops on the border and repeated threats to invade Ukraine, Achin has prepared first-aid kits, supply packs and relocation plans to Portugal or Bulgaria for the teams behind his new projects. It’s not his first tangle with turmoil in the beleaguered eastern European country. In 2014, he flew in to set up a Kiev office for DataRobot even after news of Russia’s occupation of Crimea and the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in Ukrainian airspace in the months prior. “It was only my second time outside the country,” he says. “I was petrified.”

Even amid the growing geopolitical instability, Achin is announcing the new ventures he’s been working on since his resignation from DataRobot, the $6 billion valuation company he cofounded in 2012. A self-professed micromanager, Achin plans to be neck-deep in each project. He is serving as a lead investor for Cortical Ventures, his new $50 million venture fund, and as CEO of two seed-stage AI companies: NeoCybernetica, which raised $30 million, and hOS, which is backed by $12.8 million in deals both led by NEA, the top VC firm shareholder in DataRobot. While Achin says both startups will likely come to be headquartered in Boston, the majority of current employees—including both chief technology officers—are based in Ukraine, the continuation of a bet he made while at DataRobot to look abroad for technical talent instead of relying so heavily on American engineers.

The ventures mark Achin’s return to the public sphere, after saying as he left DataRobot that he would be dedicating more time to “helping prevent future pandemics” and make contributions to “national security.” The Information reported last April that he was ousted amid disagreements over IPO timing and his hands-on management style. Achin declines to comment on the specifics of his exit, saying he wants to give the new management team the space to succeed, but says it was “not an easy thing” to leave the firm. “There were a lot of people counting on me to bring the company across the finish line, but I feel like I brought it close enough that I think it was okay to start to work on these other things,” he says.

Achin is most open in talking about Cortical Ventures, which he started up with Igor Taber, who led DataRobot’s Series B funding round for Intel Capital before Achin hired him in 2018 to be a senior vice president for corporate development. “I want to, as quickly as possible, show markups on the fund,” Achin says.

The San Francisco-based firm is currently making investments in seed and Series A startups (it’s already backed eight companies), but future vehicles, he imagines, will be bigger and include growth-stage or crossover funds. Having spent time evaluating potential startup acquisitions while at DataRobot, the duo has experience weeding through the many “completely irrational” businesses that have cropped up in the space, Achin says. “There are investors out there just looking to put their money in ‘machine learning this’ and ‘deep learning that,’” he says. “But, when you actually know the space, it’s, like, is it really a good idea to build a company entirely focused on ‘that’?”

As for the companies, Achin says he wants to remain silent on the products each company is building until they are ready for the market. “With DataRobot, we spent more than $30 million on developing the product and platform before we even tried to sell it to any customers,” he says. “I thought that was a really big advantage: having something really substantial to start to talk to enterprises about, and catching the market by surprise.”

Neither new company has begun selling to customers yet, Achin says. Still, he drops some hints on the direction of each company. Taking a page from Apple’s iOS, Achin’s HOS stands for “human operating system,” alluding to the company’s focus on human-centered AI. Practically, he says, this could involve selling its software directly to everyday people in a Netflix-like subscription model, unlike DataRobot, whose customers were enterprise companies. The company, which already employs more than 20 people, is exploring directions from improving health outcomes to counteracting the negative effect of the majority of AI that has already been deployed into the world today, he says. Achin suggests that existing AI does 1,000 times greater harm to humanity than good, singling out the way social media algorithms have proliferated polarization and disinformation. “People aren’t going to connect it directly to AI, but I can assure you AI has a lot to do with it,” he says.

NeoCybernetica, on the other hand, currently has 11 employees building technology for “robots, drones and stuff like that,” Achin says. The company will begin by building software to be used by existing machinery, but could eventually move to creating its own hardware, he adds. Achin envisions the use cases to be far more complex than the tech he spearheaded at DataRobot, which solved “simple, narrow problems,” like helping banks determine loan risks. “We’re taking on more complex, open-ended types of problems,” he says.

Most of the two companies’ venture backers so far are past investors in DataRobot, including NEA’s Tony Florence and DFJ Growth’s Mark Bailey (investing through his family office), who both say they invested primarily on the potential of Achin. Despite the ambiguity of each company, Achin says he wanted to reveal them to the public to get on the radar of potential employees and new investors. “I think the next rounds for both these companies will probably be over $100 million for each,” he says. 

Whatever the case, Achin has Ukraine squarely in his future plans, saying he’s accustomed to turmoil by now. “Of course, I’m monitoring the situation and ready to get out of here super fast if necessary,” he says. “But I don’t want to be the remote corporate CEO that makes decisions about moving people and their families without talking to them. I’m more used to it than most Americans would be.”