The fires of Intel's AI ambition were stoked once again today with the acquisition of Israeli machine learning startup Cnvrg.io. The news comes less than a week after Intel signaled its intent to acquire U.S.-based artificial intelligence (AI) modeling company SigOpt.

The financial details of the acquisition remain unclear, however, Cnvrg.io raised approximately $8 million in funding, according to CrunchBase.

"We can confirm that we have acquired Cnvrg.io," a statement from Intel read. "Cnvrg will be an independent Intel company and will continue to serve its existing and future customers."

Cnvrg.io describes itself as a "machine learning platform built by data scientists, for data scientists." The company specializes in helping data scientists manage, build, and automate machine learning.

"Cnvrg.io has built a solid foundation of support across the industry and will be a strong addition to Intel's software portfolio," wrote Karl Freund, senior analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy, in an email to SDxCentral. "Software is critical to the company’s strategy of domain-specific architectures."

The acquisition comes just days after Intel announced it would acquire SigOpt, and weeks after it said it would sell its NAND flash business to SK hynix in a deal worth $9 billion.

Like Cnvrg.io, SigOpt specializes in AI and machine learning. Specifically, the company's efforts are focused on optimizing machine learning algorithms.

In a release, the chip giant said it "plans to use SigOpt’s software technologies across Intel’s AI hardware products to help accelerate, amplify, and scale Intel’s AI software solution offerings to developers."

SigOpt CEO Scott Clark and CTO and co-founder Patrick Hayes will join Intel's machine learning performance team in the company's architecture group.

Intel has made AI a high priority in recent months, with the company's third-generation Xeon Scalable chips and latest FPGAs boasting integrated AI capabilities.

However, success with AI hardware has proven somewhat elusive for the chipmaker. Back in December, the chipmaker spent $2 billion on Habana Labs. The acquisition was followed in short order by Intel's decision to shutter its Nervana AI chip project, which it launched in collaboration with Facebook.

During the company's third-quarter earnings call last month, CEO Bob Swan said Habana's inference card had entered volume production and was shipping to customers. "We're also in proof of concepts with several major cloud service providers on Habana's training card," Swan said.