GraphLab Inc. revealed a major change of course on Thursday after raising another $18.5 million from investors and re-branding itself as it transitions beyond its academic roots. The move comes three months after the startup hit a turning point in its strategy with the first major release of its analytics platform.

The company now operating as Dato was launched to commercialize the research of CEO Carlos Guestrin, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington who created the GraphLab machine-learning framework from which the venture drew its original name. The open-source engine provides a fast and relatively simple process for iterating machine learning algorithms against unstructured data that has gained tremendous popularity in recent years.

The project evolved beyond its intended use into other areas along the way, but the underlying architecture remained the same, placing a narrow focus on processing relationship constructs, or graphs. Dato promises to move beyond that niche with a commercial reincarnation that adds support for many other kinds of information, including images and natural language text.

GraphLab Create, as the offering is called, packages that functionality into a neatly-wrapped toolkit that provides data scientists with much of the functionality they require to deliver the analytic features that users are increasingly expecting from applications. The platform offers capabilities ranging from the initial phase of collecting and organizing the necessary information to pushing out the finished models.

The new funding from Opus Capital Ventures and existing investors New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Madrona Venture Group should help Dato make its software more competitive against 0xdata’s rivaling machine learning suite, which is likewise geared towards the specific needs of data scientists. The company also has countless other less direct threats to deal with, from open-source projects to Microsoft’s cloud-based predictive analytics service.

Dato will spend the new funding on hiring more engineers to help build out its product and expand business operations. The startup intends to adopt an open-core model wherein it will offer the main components of GraphLab Create for free and sell the commercial edition to organizations requiring more advanced functionality.

The financing brings the startup’s total funding past the $25 million mark. Steve Hall from Vulcan Capital is joining the Dato board as part of the investment.