Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Flipboard 0 Dato, formerly called GraphLab Inc., has successfully raised another $18.5 million in their Series B round of venture capital to help businesses accurately predict the future. The Seattle-based startup is trying to create more accessible methods to machine learning, raised an $18.5 million in their Series B round of venture capital. In all, the company has raised a total of $25.3 million. Contributors to the round include Vulcan Capital and Opus Capital. The round includes previous investors New Enterprise Associates, Madrona Venture Group. Formerly GraphLab at the time, Dato was created through an academic project that handled machine learning projects that require connecting relationships among data. GroupLab was developed by co-founder and Chief Executive Carlos Guestrin at Carnegie Mellon University. The software was in open source. It had evolved to handle any data, including tables, text, and images. The name “Dato” means “unique data element in Portuguese or Spanish. Developers can use Dato to create predictive applications. For example, the online real estate website Zillow Inc. uses the software to predict the price of a home by combining county records, sales records, and a graph of the roads in a home’s vicinity to understand which houses are nearby. Other customers include Pandora Media Inc. This company uses Dato to improve its song recommendations. Adobe Systems Inc uses Dato to connect designers with each other and with jobs. A big opportunity for machine learning is personalized medicine. Dr. Guestrin said. “Today medical treatments are designed for the average person.” However, there’s a shortage of people who understand the machine learning. One major mission that Dato has is to make machine learning accessible to the many companies that cannot build machine learning software for their own companies. The funding from the investment firms will be invested in business development, engineering, customer support, product development and innovation, with announcements coming soon, according to Dr. Guestrin. As part of the funding, Vulcan Managing Director Steve Hall have joined the board. Twitter Tweet Facebook Share Email This article was written for Business 2 Community by Chris Atkins.Learn how to publish your content on B2C Author: Chris Atkins Follow @chrisatkins77 Chris Atkins is a visionary with a passion for business and technology. He has written about a wide variety of niches and continues to expand his knowledge by approaching the unknown with a burning desire to learn. He enjoys writing, working out, listening to music and discussing business. Chris has… View full profile ›More by this author:Samsung Announces 512GB PCIe SSD Flash DriveFacebook Acquires QuickFire NetworksNew Philips Noise-Cancelling Headphones Announced, Powered By Apple’s Lightning Port