It’s not just tech giants such as IBM Corp. and Alphabet Inc. that are investing in artificial intelligence startups.

The list of corporate heavyweights betting on the technology also includes Boeing Co., which today teamed up with Verizon Communications Inc. to pour $32.5 million into an emerging AI provider called SparkCognition Inc. The four-year-old outfit is using machine learning technology to help companies protect their infrastructure against various threats.

Chief among them, not surprisingly, is hacking. Two of the three products in SparkCognition’s portfolio are focused on fending off cyberattacks. DeepArmor, the first offering, is an AI-powered antivirus program that can be installed on employee devices and connected devices to look for malware. The other security product is a platform called SparkSecure designed to identify more advanced threats that can slip by a company’s traditional network defenses.

Among other things, the software can combat so-called “zero-day” threats that are not known to the cybersecurity community. SparkSecure accomplishes that with machine learning algorithms that aggregate large volumes of infrastructure logs and analyze them for subtle signs of malicious activity. SparkCognition has implemented a similar approach with its third product, SparkPredict, except the software is built to ingest operational information such as flight manuals rather than security data.

The latter offering is what sets the startup apart from the pack. It complements the threat detection features of SparkCognition’s other products by helping companies identify issues of the operational kind, namely equipment malfunctions. It’s described as 95 percent accurate in predicting failures and can handle data from a wide range of machinery, all the way up to airliners.

The aerospace giant isn’t making a secret of why it invested in SparkCognition. Greg Hyslop, a senior vice president at Boeing, said in a prepared statement that “they are pursuing the types of technologies that are critical to our future products and services.”

Besides the likes of Boeing, SparkCognition is also targeting organizations in the energy, manufacturing and financial sectors along with the national security community. The startup has raised a total of $38.5 million to date to support its sales and marketing efforts.

Image: SparkCognition