The past week saw the analytics movement move yet closer towards its goal of making the power of data ubiquitous the enterprise on the back of major new advances in the startup and open-source worlds. But it’s the former that set the wheels in motion after Nervana Systems Inc. raised $20.5 million in funding for its machine learning service.

The managed platform combines custom hardware optimized for running the kind of high-volume iterative operations required to train artificial intelligence in understanding patterns with a special combination of algorithms that the startup says can execute the process much faster than alternatives. The software is also available by itself under an open-source license, which is the same approach Airbnb Inc. is taking with its own machine learning technology.

The home-sharing giant released a free implementation of the model used internally to map out guest spending trends last week with the goal of making that functionality accessible to developers hoping to provide similar functionality in their own applications. Accordingly, the code can be adapted for a wide variety of other use cases involving.

But as much as that could help simplify the creation of analytic service it  still only goes a part of the way towards making data insights accessible. Airbnb’s framework leaves the matter of turning patterns produced through machine into a human-readable form unaddressed, which is where data visualization providers such as Plotly Inc. come into the picture.

The startup made headlines of its own last week after securing $5.5 million in funding to help drive the adoption of its namesake reporting platform, which is helping decision-makers at organizations such as Google, NASA and the US Air Force extract meaning from their metrics. The appeal of the software is credited in large part to a simplified interface that is set to be further enhanced by the forthcoming addition of automatic data updating.

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