[Funding alert] Edge AI startup AlphaICs raises $8M led by Emerald Technology Ventures and Endiya Partners

AlphaICs, an edge AI technology startup from California and Bengaluru, announced on Wednesday that it has raised $8 million in funding.

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 KARSEMVEN Fund, Aaruha Technology Fund, IREON Ventures, Canal Ventures, JSR Corporation, CBC Co Ltd, and the Whiteboard Capital.

Dr Michal Natora, Investment Director, Industrial IT, Emerald, will join AlphaICs’ board of directors.

The company said 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.

ALSO READ

IFC invests $10M in Endiya Partners Fund II to help startups scale

“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,” Pradeep added.

AlphaICs, founded in 2016, develops edge inference and edge learning technologies to enable AI at the edge. Its Next-generation AI architecture, called Real AI Processor (RAPTM), claims to provide the highest performance, low power, and minimal latency, enabling best-in-class edge AI inference processing. The RAPTM architecture also supports edge learning to reduce the requirement of training data, and enables auto labelling as well as continuous learning at the edge.

According to the company, 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 in 2019 to $51.9 billion by 2025 at a CAGR of 37.5 percent.

“We observed a big need in the industry for machine learning applications at the edge. AlphaICs’ technology offers significant performance advantages for edge inference as well as for edge learning solutions,” said Michal Natora, Investment Director at Emerald Technology Ventures. “The differentiated technology and the high calibre team led by Pradeep Vajram were two key criteria driving Emerald’s investment.

Sateesh Andra, Managing Director with Endiya Partners, added, “While NVidia, Google, and Startups like Graphcore are poised to dominate DataCenter AI, AlphaICs has the opportunity to be a market leader in enabling AI at the Edge.”