Explosion, a company that has combined an open source machine learning library with a set of commercial developer tools, announced a $6 million Series A today on a $120 million valuation. The round was led by SignalFire, and the company reported that today's investment represents 5% of its value. Oana Olteanu from SignalFire will be joining the board under the terms of the deal, which includes warrants of $12 million in additional investment at the same price. "Fundamentally, Explosion is a software company and we build developer tools for AI and machine learning and natural language processing. So our goal is to make developers more productive and more focused on their natural language processing, so basically understanding large volumes of text, and training machine learning models to help with that and automate some processes," company co-founder and CEO Ines Montani told me. The company started in 2016 when Montani met her co-founder, Matthew Honnibal in Berlin where he was working on the spaCy open source machine learning library.

As a company founded by data scientists, Streamlit may be in a unique position to develop tooling to help companies build machine learning applications. For starters, it developed an open-source project, but today the startup announced an expanded beta of a new commercial offering and $35 million in Series B funding. Sequoia led the investment with help from previous investors Gradient Ventures and GGV Capital. Today's round brings the total raised to $62 million, according to the company. Data scientists can download the open-source project and build a machine learning application, but it requires a certain level of technical aptitude to make all the parts work.

Amplero's software, relying on algorithms designed to detect patterns in data, aims to thread through companies' existing sales and marketing tools, running small experiments to find optimal ways for businesses to communicate with their customers. Seattle startup Amplero has bagged $17.5 million in investment, which the company plans to put to work building out its machine-learning-powered software for business marketers. Amplero's software, relying on algorithms designed to detect patterns in data, aims to thread through companies' existing sales and marketing tools, running small experiments to find optimal ways for businesses to communicate with their customers. The startup was spun out of Seattle invoicing-software company Globys last year. Olly Downs, formerly Globys' chief technology officer, leads the firm, which has about 45 employees.