Computer vision startup Recogni announced $25 million in Series A financing this week, led by GreatPoint Ventures with participation from Toyota AI Ventures, BMW i Ventures, Fluxunit and DNS Capital.
Founded in 2017, the San Jose-based firm is focused on creating high-performance and low-power AI processing to enable autonomous vehicles to efficiently process sensor data in real-time and reach Level 3+ autonomy and beyond.
"We see a huge opportunity here to truly achieve the goal of full vehicle autonomy with the Recogni platform,” said Ashok Krishnamurthi, Managing Partner at GreatPoint Ventures. “While scoping the market, we realized that most of the neural network accelerator technologies are either optimized for performance or power – none are optimized for both. We believe that the Recogni platform is orders of magnitude superior to anything we have seen. Further, this is a team we've known for years and have backed in the past. They are the right group to not only develop this promising technology but also get it into the hands of the auto OEMs.”
“Leveraging our background in machine learning, computer vision, silicon, and system design, we are engineering a fundamentally new system that benefits the auto industry with very high efficiency at the lowest power consumption.”
Recogni plans to use the funding to boost its inferencing system technology and grow its engineering team. The company is currently in discussions with multiple auto manufacturers regarding technology partnership opportunities.
“The issues within the Level 2+, 3, 4, and 5 autonomy ecosystem range from capturing/generating training data to inferring in real-time. These vehicles need datacenter class performance while consuming minuscule amounts of power,” said RK Anand, CEO of Recogni. “Leveraging our background in machine learning, computer vision, silicon, and system design, we are engineering a fundamentally new system that benefits the auto industry with very high efficiency at the lowest power consumption. This round, one of the largest initial venture rounds raised by any AI silicon company in the space, is testament to our experience and responsible approach.”
