- AIStorm announced it has raised $16 million in an oversubscribed Series B financing round from strategic investors. These are the details.
AIStorm — an innovator of high-performance AI-in-Sensor processors — announced it has raised $16 million in an oversubscribed Series B financing round from strategic investors that include AsusTek, Egis Technology, Knowles Corporation, Meyer Corporation, and Senvest Management.
In collaboration with its strategic partners, AIStorm is targeting a range of applications where its technology offers unique advantages including imaging and audio, facial recognition, access control, behavioral tracking, people counting, face detection, object tracking, and segmentation.
To accelerate access to key markets, AIStorm partnered with established companies that are leaders in their respective markets:
– AsusTek is known as a leader in laptops and residential IoT devices
– Egis is a leader in biometric sensing with its chips used by most of the major handset makers worldwide
– Knowles Corporation is a market leader in advanced micro-acoustic microphones
– Meyer Corporation is a leader in cookware and food-processing equipment
AIStorm’s charge-domain processing approach differs from solutions used by ARM licensees, FPGAs, or vendors of process-in-memory solutions. And It accepts charge directly from the sensor like electrons from a pixel or MEMs microphone, and multiplies that charge directly. And AIStorm’s partners benefit from an AI-at-the-edge technology that is scalable, offers MAC efficiencies up to several thousand TOPS per watt, and works with conventional tool flows.
KEY QUOTES:
“AIStorm’s approach is the only technology that allows the sensor to couple directly to popular convolutional neural networks. This allows AIStorm to deliver true, template-based ‘always-on’ at the edge—at prices that deep-submicron digital competitors cannot match for the same performance. This is a winning formula in the highly competitive IoT sector.”
— David Schie, CEO of AIStorm
“AIStorm’s unique, charge-switched analog computing, coupled with its wise AI-in-Sensor approach, offers dramatic advantages for ultra-low power, ultra-low-latency AIoT edge computing. We look forward to an ongoing strategic collaboration.”
— Jonney Shih, chairman of AsusTek
“Offering true CNN functionality and requiring a minimum of external components, AIStorm’s solutions are well positioned to dominate the AI edge space — especially in always-on, battery-operated applications such as cell phones, TV remotes, laptops, home security, and authentication.”
— Nav Sooch, founder and chairman of Silicon Labs
