Skymind Inc., a deep learning startup with big-name users such as NASA and Ford Motor Co., today announced it has raised $11.5 million in funding to expand internationally.

The financing came from a group of investors that included ServiceNow Inc. and Sumitomo Corp., one of the largest industrial companies in Japan. San Francisco-based venture capital firm TransLink Capital led the round.

Skymind offers a collection of tools that aim to make the process of building and deploying artificial intelligence models more efficient. Most of them are open source, including the popular Deeplearning4j AI development engine for which the startup is perhaps best known. Skymind’s commercial offering, in turn, is a platform called SKIL that’s designed to speed up the task of readying neural networks for production use.

SKIL works with all the major AI development engines on the market. Engineers can import deep learning models from the specific engine used by their team and configure them to run on either on central processing units or on graphics cards. SKIL automatically distributes the computing load among the chips, while also handling related tasks such as resource scheduling.

Companies can use the platform to both train their AI models and process live data once those models are past the initial learning phase. In addition, SKIL provides a number of productivity features to make the overall development cycle smoother.

Skymind has built version control features into the platform that enable engineers to log every tweak and change they make to a model. A complementary monitoring tool provides insight into the performance of neural networks, allowing AI teams to compare different versions of an algorithm to identify the most efficient implementation.

Skymind will use the new funding to drive the adoption of its platform in North America and Asia. The startup has raised more than $26 million from investors to date.

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