Petuum Inc., a Carnegie Mellon University spinoff headed by Machine Learning Professor Eric Xing, has closed $93 million in Series B funding led by a subsidiary of SoftBank Group Corp. 

The new investment brings the total raised by Petuum since its launch in July 2016 to $108 million. A previous investor, Advantech Capital, was involved in the latest round of financing.

Petuum also has been named one of the "10 Hottest Startups of 2017" by Investopedia.com.

Anticipating that artificial intelligence and machine learning will become the dominant workload of computers, Petuum has developed an infrastructure platform that that makes it easy for a broad range of users to build any type of machine learning or deep learning application at scale. What's more, the platform makes it possible to deploy many applications on a wide range of enterprise hardware — including datacenters and the internet of things — and manage applications and hardware from a single terminal.

The platform is based on years of fundamental research in machine learning.

Xing, Petuum's CEO and chief scientist, founded the Pittsburgh company last year with Qirong Ho, who earned his Ph.D. in machine learning at CMU, and Ning Li. They have since assembled a team of more than 50 researchers and developers. The new round of funding will allow them to expand that team and focus on deploying their product in industries with high AI potential, but low adoption, such as manufacturing and health care.

"Our goal is to build in Pittsburgh, recognizing the strengths of the city and of CMU in helping us obtain the top talent we need," Xing said.