General Electric Co. said Tuesday it would buy a pair of tech startups and unveiled several new customers for its GE Digital business, as the conglomerate seeks to convince investors its future is as much about software as heavy machinery.

GE said it acquired Wise.io Inc., a machine learning firm in Berkeley, Calif., and Bit Stew Systems Inc., which enables the “ingestion” of masses of data for industrial applications. Terms weren’t disclosed. The deals will add about 120 staff to help build out the product offerings of GE...