In the crowded field of startups working to ease artificial intelligence development, DataRobot Inc. stands out. The company is one of the oldest players, founded in 2012, and it’s now among the best-funded as well as thanks to a new $206 million investment announced this morning.

Sapphire Ventures led the round. It was joined by Intel Corp., New Enterprise Associates, Meritech Capital and other institutional backers.

DataRobot has built a development platform for speeding up AI projects that itself employs machine learning under the hood. The startup’s algorithms can look at the data the user is looking to process, find a neural network suitable for the task and then automatically fine-tune it to boost performance. DataRobot also handles many intermediary steps such as organizing records for analysis.

The startup claims its platform simplifies development to the point that building a machine learning model becomes possible even for workers who don’t know how to code. DataRobot also targets more technically-savvy users such as data scientists, positioning its automation features as a means of speeding up the repetitive aspects of their work. 

Nevada Nanotech Systems Inc., a maker of air quality sensors, is using DataRobot-powered models to test devices before shipping them out to customers. The Philadelphia 76ers’ in-house analytics team is employing the software to predict season ticket renewals.

DataRobot also boasts much bigger customers, including a third of the Fortune 50, and claims users have built some 1.3 billion models to date.

The startup didn’t go into detail about what it plans to do with the new funding. However, it’s possible that part of the investment will go toward acquisitions given that DataRobot has bought four companies since 2017. Its most recent purchase was ParallelM Inc., whose software forms the basis of a new offering called MLOps that debuted today alongside the funding announcement.

DataRobot operates in a competitive market. In addition to H2O.ai Inc. and  other fellow startups, the company is facing off against much bigger players such as Google LLC, which provides an automated machine learning  service called AutoML as part of its cloud platform.

DataRobot has raised $431 million from investors to date. The startup’s latest funding round comes on the same day GitLab Inc., a GitHub rival, revealed it has nabbed a $268 million investment of its own at a $2.75 billion valuation.

Photo: DataRobot