DotData Inc., an up-and-coming provider of artificial intelligence development software, has convinced Goldman Sachs Group Inc. that it can stand out in the crowded AI development tools market.

The banking giant was among the participants in a $23 million Series A funding round the startup announced Wednesday evening. Goldman Sachs was joined by Japanese venture capital firm JAFCO and NEC Corp., the Tokyo-based technology firm that DotData spun out of in 2018.

The startup, now based in California, offers a development platform that uses machine learning to reduce the amount of work involved in building AI models. DotData Enterprise can harmonize information from different sources into a single, consistent dataset, use it to train a neural network and then package up the neural network for deployment.

The process is dictated by users, but the startup’s algorithms do much of the heavy lifting. One of the more time-consuming tasks DotData automates is feature engineering. That’s the process of turning the input an AI receives, say two spreadsheet columns with latitudes and longitudes, into a form the neural network has an easier time understanding, such as a coordinate.

DotData Enterprise also optimize the AI model itself through a trial-and-error process. The platform tests out hundreds of tweaks to a neural network to find enhancements that may help improve its accuracy. Once the AI is ready, the platform allows users to deploy it via a programming interface that’s relatively straightforward to incorporate into an application.

DotData claims that the offering has been adopted by several unnamed Fortune 500 companies since its launch last year. Thanks to this adoption, it saw revenue growth triple over the last 12 months.

The startup hopes to maintain its sales momentum by investing the new $23 million funding round in customer acquisition activities and by adopting a faster-paced development roadmap.

DotData competes with the likes of H2O.ai Inc. and DataRobot Inc., which raised $206 million last month for its rival AI creation platform. There are also several more narrowly focused players in the market such as DarwinAI Inc., a Canadian startup automating the task of adapting existing neural networks for new projects.

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