Edge AI company AlphaICs raises $8 million in funding round
Jan 20, 2021
Bengaluru (Karnataka) [India], Jan 20 : AlphaICs, the artificial intelligence technology company from California-based Milpitas, said on Wednesday it has secured funding worth eight million dollars (about Rs 58 crore).
The company designs and develops high-performance AI chips for edge computing. It will use the funds to tape-out the Gluon AI chip, to develop the software stack and to build system solutions for its target markets.
The series B round was led by Endiya Partners and Emerald Technology Ventures with the participation of existing series A investors ReBright Partners and 3One4 Capital, along with Aaruha Technology Fund, Ireon Ventures, Canal Ventures, JSR Corporation, CBC Co Ltd and the Whiteboard Capital.
With the growth in popularity of deep neural networks, there has been a huge demand for running such networks on edge devices in real-time.
Omdia forecasts that global AI edge chipset revenue will grow from 7.7 billion dollars in 2019 to 51.9 billion dollars by 2025 at a CAGR of 37.5 per cent.
"AlphaICs innovative architecture will empower system integrators to create AI solutions with a short time-to-market while staying within the systems cost and thermal constraints," said Pradeep Vajram, Chairman and CEO of AlphaICs.
"This funding will help us bring our first inference co-processor to the market for vision applications with low latency requirements. We are also working with strategic partners to bring innovative solutions to the industrial, automotive and surveillance markets," he said in a statement.
"Edge AI applications in consumer markets like high-end smartphones, wearables as well as enterprise markets like robots, cameras and sensors will be pervasive in the next few years, said Sateesh Andra, Managing Director with Endiya Partners.
"AlphaICs RAP accelerates inferencing as well as learning tasks on-device, rather than in a remote data centre delivering benefits like low latency, cost, data privacy, and security. While NVidia, Google and startups like Graphcore are poised to dominate datacentre AI, AlphaICs has the opportunity to be a market leader in enabling AI at the Edge."
