Petuum secures $93M Series B to push AI into the mainstream

With a shortage of machine learning developers bearing down on the industry, startups and big tech companies alike are moving to democratize the tools necessary to commercialize artificial intelligence. The latest startup, Petuum, is announcing a $93 million Series B this morning from Softbank and Advantech Capital. Founded last year by Dr. Eric Xing, a Carnegie Mellon machine learning professor, Dr. Qirong Ho and Dr. Ning Li, Petuum is building software to facilitate two components of machine learning development. First, the team is automating aspects of data preparation and machine learning model selection. This is useful for novices that might otherwise struggle to even make use of common machine learning frameworks like TensorFlow and Caffe.