Intel Corp. made another artificial intelligence acquisition Thursday, buying a company called Vertex.AI that sells tools for developers to add deep learning capabilities to their applications.

Vertex, a three-year-old startup based in Seattle, leads the development of the open source PlaidML platform. That’s a “portable deep learning engine” first released in October last year that enables developers to deploy AI models on any kind of device, be it Windows, Linux or MacOS.

TechCrunch, which first reported the acquisition, said Vertex founders Choong Ng and Jeremy Bruestle designed PlaidML in order to create a framework that bridges the gap between AI software and various kinds of hardware.

“The lack of portable, developer-friendly tools prevents most organizations from realizing the power of deep learning for their business,” Ng wrote in a blog post in 2016. “A year ago we saw a way to solve the compatibility and portability problems all at once, for all platforms, using a new software approach. It’s required rethinking how we implement the algorithms, and it’s been a challenge to engineer — but the payoff is worth it.”

Intel said Vertex will be absorbed into its Artificial Intelligence Products Group. PlaidML will be used to support “a variety of hardware.” In addition, Intel said it plans to integrate its nGraph library for developing deep learning frameworks with the platform. It will also continue to develop PlaidML, which will remain open source under an Apache 2.0 license.

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said the acquisition was a smart move for Intel as it tries to figure out how to tap into the potential of AI for next-generation applications that feed on it. “AI model portability is key for enterprises as they need to embed intelligence onto all kinds of computing platforms,” he said.

Intel has been aggressive with its AI acquisitions in the past few years, buying up companies such as Altera Corp. for its field-programmable gate arrays, which are hardware accelerators that can be used to speed up AI workloads. Other acquisitions include AI chipmaker Nervana Systems, computer vision processing startup Movidius Ltd. and most recently eASIC Corp., which builds programmable computer chips that can be customized during the production process.

Intel has also been busy developing its own AI software, such as the OpenVINO toolkit.

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