At the Embedded World Germany event, Qualcomm announced the entry into an agreement to buy EdgeImpulse, which will enhance its offering for developers and expand its leadership in AI-based capabilities to power AI-enabled products and services across IoT. The closing of this deal is subject to customary closing conditions.
This deal is anticipated to complement Qualcomm’s strategic approach to IoT transformation, which includes a comprehensive chipset roadmap, unified software architecture, a suite of services, developer resources, ecosystem partners, comprehensive solutions, and IoT blueprints to address diverse industry needs and challenges.
The widespread adoption of AI in IoT solutions is driven by the ability to augment or automate workflows through rapid data collection, AI-enabled analysis, and enhanced decision-making, allowing enterprises to benefit from improved operational flexibility and efficiency. And Qualcomm is prepared to capitalize on this trend through its leading position in enabling industrial transformation with IoT and edge AI technology leadership.
Since last year, Qualcomm has adapted its strategy to meet the requirements of various IoT segments offering integrated solutions that combine services, software, and hardware, designed to scale across multiple verticals, including consumer, security, healthcare, retail, energy, and enterprise.
Edge Impulse’s end-to-end edge AI platform enables 170,000+ developers to easily create, deploy, and monitor AI models on a wide array of edge devices, with support for varied microcontrollers and processors featuring AI accelerators from multiple semiconductor providers. And the development platform includes a comprehensive set of tools and features for data collection and preparation, model training, deployment and monitoring, all with an easy-to-use, user-friendly interface requiring little or no code at all.
The developers can utilize Edge Impulse’s platform to build solutions for a wide range of applications such as asset tracking and monitoring, manufacturing, anomaly detection, and predictive maintenance systems—using various AI capabilities including computer vision, time-series data, audio events and speech recognition.
Qualcomm Technologies anticipates giving developers on Edge Impulse’s platform the ability to target Qualcomm Dragonwing processors, which feature superior on-device AI inferencing, computer vision, graphics and processing capabilities. Integration with Qualcomm AI Hub enhances the optimization of AI models for Qualcomm Technologies’ platforms, leading to a peak of up to 4 times increased inference performance, and reduced model size and memory footprint.
Edge Impulse currently supports Dragonwing QCS6490 and QCS5430 processors and is scheduled to add support for additional Dragonwing processors for industrial and embedded IoT applications. Edge Impulse will maintain its current website and remains dedicated to supporting developers and ecosystem partners.
KEY QUOTE:
“We are thrilled about the opportunity to significantly enhance our IoT offerings with Edge Impulse’s advanced AI-powered end-to-end platform that will complement our strategic approach to IoT transformation. We anticipate that this acquisition will strengthen our leadership in AI and developer enablement, enhancing our ability to provide comprehensive technology for critical sectors such as retail, security, energy and utilities, supply chain management, and asset management. IoT opens the door for a myriad of opportunities, and success is about building real-world solutions, enabling developers and enterprises with AI capabilities to extract intelligence from data, and providing them with the tools to build the applications and services that will power the digital transformation of industries.”
- Nakul Duggal, group general manager, automotive, industrial and embedded IoT, and cloud computing, Qualcomm Technologies
