Leading AI technology company AlphaICs has secured $8 million funding, the company said on Tuesday. The company from Milpitas, California and Bangalore, India, 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 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. Dr. Michal Natora, the Investment Director Industrial IT at Emerald, will join AlphaICs' board of directors.
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%.
AlphaICs' Real AI Processor (RAPTM), based on a proprietary highly modular and scalable architecture, enables AI acceleration for low power edge applications, as well as high performance edge data centers. AlphaICs' architecture provides best-in-class inference performance, and it is equally suited for edge learning. The rapidly developing field of Edge learning promotes privacy, enables automated labelling, and facilitates continuous learning of new scenarios.
"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.
"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. AlphaICs RAP accelerates inferencing as well as learning tasks on-device, rather than in a remote data center delivering benefits like low latency, cost, data privacy, and security." said Sateesh Andra, Managing Director with Endiya Partners. He 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."
"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 & 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."
