Kneron, a San Diego, CA-based provider of edge artificial intelligence (AI) solutions, completed a US$18m series A1 financing.
The round was led by Horizons Ventures.
The company, which brings total funding raised to date to more than US$33m, plans to use the funds to accelerate product development and collaborate with strategic partners to implement vertical industrial applications, focusing in three major areas: smart home, smart surveillance and smartphones.
Led by Albert Liu, founder and CEO, Kneron offers edge AI solutions by moving part of the AI computing power from the cloud to edge devices to perform real-time AI recognition, inference, and analysis without connecting to the cloud.
Solutions include a dedicated AI Neural Processing Unit (NPU), which provides high computing performance with low power consumption and will create several possibilities for AI applications for smart home, smart surveillance, smartphones, robots, drones, and IoT devices.
A 3D AI solution will be launched in the second half of this year.
Other backers in the company include Alibaba Entrepreneurs Fund, CDIB, Himax Technologies, Inc, Qualcomm, Thundersoft, Sequoia Capital (its sub funds: Cloudatlas), and Cyzone.
FinSMEs
31/05/2018