Petuum Inc. is looking to help more companies take advantage of artificial intelligence and build self-learning applications.

To support the effort, the Pittsburgh-based startup has raised $93 million in a newly announced funding round. The investment, announced today, was led by a subsidiary of Japanese telecommunications giant SoftBank Group Corp., a major force in the venture capital world. The company earlier this year established a record-breaking $93 billion fund dedicated to investing in promising technology firms, though this round is not part of that particular fund.

Petuum certainly fits the bill, though. The startup, which is led by three AI researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, develops software tools designed to automate the complicated technical groundwork involved in implementing neural networks. Founder, Chief Executive and Chief Scientist Eric Xing said in a statement that the company believes AI “should be standardized, accessible and mass-producible, so that all can benefit.”

The foundation of the lineup is the Petuum Operating System. It acts as an abstraction layer that enables companies to run their AI models on different kinds of hardware, from servers to connected devices, without having to adapt the code manually for each environment. As a result, the resources that would normally have to be sunk into the chore can be freed up for other tasks.

Petuum offers the platform alongside a framework called Poseidon for optimizing how AI models run. One of its most notable features is a so-called amplification capability for projects involving deep learning, an approach that uses artificial neural networks to emulate some aspects of how the human brain learns. According to Petuum, the software can scale a neural network across multiple servers without requiring developers to make time-consuming code optimizations.

Lastly, the startup is developing niche AI tools customized for specific industries. The first in the lineup is PetuumMed, a system designed to help clinicians diagnose patients and identify treatment options.

Petuum will use the new funding to step up product development and customer acquisition efforts. The capital infusion makes it one of the best-funded AI development startups out there. That’s a good position to be in, given the large number of players, both large and small, offering tools designed to help companies build AI-powered applications.

Petuum has raised $108 million in funding to date.

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