DataRobot Inc., a unicorn that makes software for developing artificial intelligence models, has bought fellow startup Paxata Inc. to add more depth to its feature set.

The deal size wasn’t disclosed in the acquisition announcement that went out Thursday afternoon. It was most likely a fairly sizable transaction. DataRobot is backed by over $400 million in funding, while Paxata has raised $86 million of its own from investors including Accel and boasts thousands of customers.

Boston-based DataRobot’s eponymous software platform enables knowledge workers to build customized AI models without having to write any code. Paxata, in turn, has developed a data preparation tool for converting raw information into an analyzable form. The Paxata Adaptive Information Platform is used by business intelligence teams at companies such as Hitachi Ltd. to cleanse their datasets of erroneous records, fix formatting issues, add extra details from other sources and share results with colleagues.

The acquisition has a lot of rationale behind it. AI models like the kind DataRobot’s platform is used to build require training data to create and that training data has to go through extensive preparation before it’s suitable for development projects. Paxata will make the process easier for DataRobot’s enterprise customers.

Paxata’s platform includes capabilities, for, among others, simplifying feature engineering, which is often the single most time-consuming part of AI projects. Feature engineering is the task of compressing and enriching a model’s training dataset to speed up learning. For example, given two database columns containing longitudes and latitudes, an AI team might fuse them into one column containing a single coordinate per row to make the information easier to interpret for the neural network being trained.

DataRobot has already started the process of merging Paxata into its business. DataRobot unveiled a product integration with Paxata’s platform in conjunction with the acquisition announcement and said that the tool will continue to be available on a standalone basis.

As for the Paxata team, the roughly 100 employees who make it up are all set to join DataRobot while the current Redwood City, California office where they’re based will become the company’s newest West Coast outpost.

The acquisition is the latest in a series of strategic purchases for the AI development provider. DataRobot has bought two other California startups this year alone: ParallelM Inc. in June and Cursor Inc. in February. 

Photo: DataRobot