GE just can’t say no to an attractive Big Data startup. Spurred on by its vision of revolutionizing industry with its Industrial Internet, it’s invested hundreds of millions of dollars into Big Data initiatives that can help ito to better understand the maintenance needs of industrial equipment. It’s first major play was its $105 million investment in Pivotal’s platform-as-a-service, which was quickly followed by the launch of its own Predictivity analytics platform last month.

Now, GE has put its money where its mouth is again, taking a stake in Big Data startup Ayasdi, which yesterday announced series B funding to the tune of $30.6 million. Alongside GE, Institutional Venture Partners, Citi Ventures and existing investors Floodgate and Khosla Ventures have also added to the pile.

Why is GE so interested in Ayasdi? Because of its “Insight Discovery” technology, that’s why. The software, which has been employed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the National Science Foundation (NSF) since 2008, promises to discover relevant queries for extremely complex data sets automatically and quickly. It’s this automation that sets Insight Discovery apart, as it means you won’t have to ask any questions yourself to discover insights from data sets. Instead, Ayasdi’s platform relies on ‘machine learning’ and ‘topological data analysis’ to look for patterns within data sets.

Ayasdi’s approach bucks the trend of many Big Data companies today, which seem to be increasingly focused on speeding up their querying processes for data sets. Instead, what Ayasdi does is to give business executives the same abilities as data scientists.

We can imagine quite a few industries might be drooling over the prospect of applying this kind of technology, something that’s evidenced by the number of high profile clients its already signed up since its debut six months ago. Besides GE, Ayasdi’s penned deals with Anadarko, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Citigroup, Harvard Medical School, Merck, Mount Sinai Hospital, the University of California San Francisco and the US Food and Drug Administration. It’s also announced partnerships with Pivotal (see how interested GE is?) and Cloudera.

With $30 million safely tucked away in the bank, Ayasdi’s now planning a big expansion, with more sales professionals likely to be added to its staff. It’s also going to blow a large portion of that cash on refining its machine learning techniques to improve the software’s efficiency further.