Lewis & Clark Ventures led a $9 million Series A-1 funding round for a Utah-based predictive analytics and machine learning software company.

Other investors participating in the financing round for the company, called Big Squid, include Silverton Partners, Signal Peak Ventures and Kickstart Seed Fund. The funding brings Big Squid’s total amount raised to more than $18.5 million.

“With this added investment we will be able to expedite focus on our product integrations with top data and analytics platforms as well as growth of the team to execute quickly and bring automated machine learning power to more businesses faster,” Chris Knoch, CEO of Big Squid, said in statement.

The company plans to use the funding to continue development on its Kraken platform, which allows analysts and decision makers to apply machine learning in their own data.

“Most businesses that we talk to have the desire to become more data informed in their decision making, and rightfully so, yet few have the resources or even truly understand what that means. Hiring a full team of data scientists to develop predictive models is expensive and challenging, so it seems natural to us to build your strategy atop software that empower both technical and non-technical users alike to unlock the value that’s already sitting in your data repositories,” said Brian Hopcraft, managing director at Lewis & Clark Ventures. “We’re thrilled to be working with this world class team and believe this is the early innings of democratizing data science.”

This article originally appeared in the St. Louis Business Journal. View the rest of the article here.