This week Ayasdi received funding from GE and Cloudera snatched up a machine learning startup called Myrrix. In addition, Syncsort released the results of an extensive study on Hadoop adoption in Europe.

Ayasdi is a Palo Alto-based firm that specializes in Big Data automation. Its Insight Discovery Platform is based on software that has been used by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) since 2008. The company announced on Wednesday that it has closed a 30.6 million funding round led by General Electric, with participation from bigwig VCs such as Institutional Venture Partners, Citi Ventures and existing investors Floodgate and Khosla Ventures.

SiliconAngle’s Mike Wheatley pointed out that Ayasdi’s machine learning technology fits right in with GE’s Industrial Internet initiative, especially in light of its close relations with Pivotal and Cloudera. As it happens, the latter also invested in machine learning this week.

Cloudera shelled out an undisclosed amount for Myrrix, a London-based firm that offers a “complete, real-time, scalable clustering and recommender system.” The platform is based on the Apache Mahout machine learning and data mining project, which Myrrix co-founder Sean Owen helped create.

Owen announced the acquisition shortly after data processing specialist Syncsort released a study that sheds new light on the popularity of Hadoop in Europe. The company found that 41 percent of European organizations leverage Cloudera’s distribution of the framework, 30 percent leverage the vanilla version, and 18 percent use the Hortonworks Data Platform. MapR comes in fourth with a nine percent stake.