In an SEC filing, it was revealed that Amazon was buying Perceive for $80 million in cash, which is a company that develops breakthrough neural network inference solutions that push the performance-accuracy-power envelope, while also protecting the security and privacy of consumers. Launched in 2018, Perceive is a majority-owned subsidiary of Xperi Corporation.
This acquisition was set up as an asset purchase agreement that is expected to close by the end of this year. An Amazon spokesperson said that the company is excited to bring over Perceive’s talented team to join the efforts in bringing LLMs and multi-modal experiences to devices that are capable of runing on the edge. And most of the 44 employees at Perceive are expected to join Amazon.
Perceive is headed by co-CEOs Murali Dharan and Steve Teig. And the company’s employees are spread across the globe. The company will continue to operate a lab in Idaho. Teig’s drove the creation of Perceive while serving as CTO of Xperi where he supervised technology development, including core audio and imaging innovations while also leading the company’s machine learning team. Dharan – who was previously responsible for the strategic direction, management and growth of the licensing business of Xperi – is responsible for leading Perceive’s business operations, including sales, marketing, customer success and operations.
Amazon is buying Perceive for its Devices & Services unit, which houses Alexa, the Echo smart speaker devices, Fire TV, etc. This unit is headed by former Microsoft executive Panos Panay.
Xperi had originally incubated Perceive and then spun it off as a subsidiary in 2018. Perceive’s flagship product is the Ergo AI processor, which runs data center-class neural networks within all sorts of environments even power-constrained.
