Petuum has built an artificial intelligence platform that it hopes will encourage more development for sectors such as healthcare.
Petuum, a US-based machine learning spinout from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), closed its series B round at $93m on Tuesday led by an unnamed subsidiary of telecoms group SoftBank.
Venture capital firm Advantech Capital participated in the round.
Petuum was spun out from CMU’s Machine Learning department in July 2016 by Eric Xing, Qirong Ho and Ning Li. The company has developed an operating system (OS) that lets machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) developers collate data from varied sources such as electronic health records or social media.
The platform is intended to allow easy integration with hardware, for example data farms or internet-of-things technology, and with software applications such as language processing or anomaly detection.
The cash will help fund a recruitment drive for the technical and business team and market the company’s OS to industries it regards as having latent demand for AI, such as manufacturing or healthcare.
The spinout has now raised $108m in total, including $15m in a series A round led by Advantech in November 2016 with contributions from VC firm Northern Light Venture Capital and VC fund Oriza Ventures.
Deep Nishar, managing partner at SoftBank said: “We are firm believers in the value that AI can bring to a broad range of industries. Petuum’s work will finally help to unlock that value.”
Eric Xing, now CEO of Petuum, added: “Our team is excited to solve the problem of AI’s high barrier to entry. We believe this technology should be standardised, accessible and mass-producible, so that all can benefit from AI, machine learning and deep learning.”
