AI hardware startup Recogni raises $102M for self-driving solutions

Recogni Inc., a startup developing artificial intelligence hardware for autonomous vehicles, today announced that it has raised $102 million in a funding round co-led by Celesta Capital and GreatPoint Ventures.

The Series C round was also joined by existing and recent investors including Mayfield, DNS Capital, BMW i Ventures Inc. and the Public Investment Fund’s Tasaru Mobility Investments.

Founded in 2017, Recogni develops AI hardware that enables autonomous vehicles to grasp surrounding environments visually through raw data from sensors. Object detection requires an amazing deal of knowledge taken from video and other sensors and Recogni’s hardware allows for more rapid recognition. The corporate said its chips allow for higher computational power at lower energy use, meaning higher efficiency.

Many AI chips available on the market, reminiscent of graphical processing units, supplied by other major AI hardware manufacturers, reminiscent of Nvidia Corp., concentrate on consuming massive amounts of raw data with a view to assist with developing and training AI models. Nevertheless, Recogni’s chips work on the opposite end of the AI development spectrum called interference, where the AI model is deployed and is used to unravel tasks or make predictions based on live data.

For generative AI models, inference occurs when a chatbot answers a matter or summarizes an article for a user, when a model identifies a picture of a dog as a dog or when an AI model classifies spam email. For instance, when driving a vehicle would want to make inferences based on its surroundings, reminiscent of the road markings, signs and other vehicles visible to its sensors on the road with a view to adjust its behavior.

In consequence of its efficient low-power solution, the corporate said Recogni’s hardware solution is viable for greater than just self-driving vehicles but may be deployed across quite a few industries reminiscent of biopharmaceutical, financial, healthcare, retail, entertainment and fraud detection.

“The critical need for solutions that directly address the important thing challenges in AI inference processing — compute capability, scalability, accuracy and energy savings — is more urgent than ever,” Chief Executive Marc Bolitho. “Recogni is leading this transformative wave, engineering pivotal advances that may redefine data centers and enterprise and revolutionize industries like automotive and aerospace.”

Recogni launched its hardware solution, the Scorpio, its first low-power compute chip for autonomous vehicles, in December 2022. It’s capable of manufacturing 1,000 teraflops of inference for autonomous mobility, the corporate said, at the bottom power within the industry — with 10 to twenty times more power efficiency than competing solutions on the time.

“Generative AI systems available in the market today are highly inefficient and eat an excessive amount of power while adding system complexity, but Recogni’s proven technology is raising the bar on power performance to handle the big compute needs of AI workloads,” said Sriram Viswanathan, Celesta Capital founding managing partner and chairman of Recogni’s board of directors.

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