Apple, Inc. has made a serious play in the artificial intelligence (AI) space by acquiring machine learning startup Turi, Inc., a company previously known as both Dato and GraphLab.

The acquisition price is believed to be $200 million according to Geekwire who broke the story.

Founded in 2013, Turi offers a machine learning platform that creates Big Data analytics for its users based on an open source project initially intended for applying large-scale machine learning to graph analysis.

The product allows developers to build apps with both machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities, allowing enterprises both small and large make better sense of data; use cases given by the company include recommendation engines, fraud detection, predicting customer churn, sentiment analysis, and customer segmentation.

Turi’s customers include Zillow, ExxonMobil, StumbleUpon, Adobe, Pandora, and Bosch and its competitors include Databricks, H2O, and Neo4j among others.

Apple tentatively confirmed the acquisition by neither officially confirming nor denying it by simply stating that “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”

What Apple plans to do with the company is not clear, however the Geekwire report claims that Turi’s team is expected to remain in the Seattle region and continue to grow as Apple builds out further expertise in data science, artificial intelligence and machine learning. The technology could, in theory, be applied to improving Apple products such as Siri.

Nice payday

Founded out of an idea from Carnegie Mellon University and incubated at the University of Washington, Turi has delivered a nice payday for its founders and early investors who took on a concept for large-scale machine learning algorithms to extract and analyze relationships between entities in multi-dimensional graph datasets and turned it into a $200 million company.

While a larger buy for Apple, Turi isn’t the first AI company the tech giant has acquired with Perceptio and Emotient among a list of companies it has acquired over the last 18 months that verge into AI, machine learning, and related fields.

Prior to acquisition Turi had raised $25.5 million over two rounds from investors including Madrona Venture Group, New Enterprise Associates, Opus Capital, and Vulcan Capital.

Image credit: Turi