Israeli proprietary chip developer for deep learning on edge devices Hailo today announced the completion of a $12.5 million Series A financing round. The company’s investors include Ourcrowd.com, Maniv Mobility, the Drive accelerator fund: Next Gear; as well as angel investors, Hailo Chairman Zohar Zisapel and Delek Motors CEO Gil Agmon. The company will use the funding to further develop its deep learning processor, which will deliver datacenter processing capacity to edge devices. This latest funding round brings the total raised to date by the Tel Aviv-based company to $16 million.
Hailo's breakthrough deep learning processor, whose initial samples are expected to enter the market in first half of 2019, will be able to run embedded AI applications on edge devices that are installed in autonomous vehicles, drones, and smart home appliances such as personal assistants, smart cameras and smart TVs, alongside IoT, AR and VR platforms, wearables and security products. The Hailo processor radically reduces size, power and cost, making it suitable for local processing of high-resolution sensory data in real time.
The automotive industry, which is one of Hailo's key target markets, is undergoing a major disruption, rapidly adopting deep learning methods to enable advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving applications that require continuous sensing of surroundings. According to IC Insights, Integrated Circuits used in automobiles and other vehicles are expected to generate global sales of $42.9 billion in 2021, compared to $22.9 billion in 2016. Existing general-purpose processor infrastructure cannot efficiently run compute-intensive deep learning algorithms necessary for these applications.
Hailo CEO Orr Danon said, "The 70-year old architecture of existing processors is inadequate to meet today’s deep learning and AI processing needs. Hailo is revolutionizing the underlying architecture of the processor to boost deep learning processing by several orders of magnitude. We have completely redesigned the pillars of computer architecture - memory, control and compute - and the relations between them."
Hailo Chairman Zohar Zisapel said, "In the last few years, we are witnessing a revolution in the automotive industry with the quick entry of new players and technologies into the market. The product that Hailo is developing is expected to be a key component in this revolution in which artificial intelligence is one of the building blocks."
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on June 5, 2018
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