Israeli edge AI chipmaker Hailo today announced it has completed a $136 million Series C financing round led by Poalim Equity and Gil Agmon. No valuation for Hailo was disclosed but sources close to the company say the money was raised at a company valuation of $1.13 billion, making Hailo Israel's latest unicorn.
Also participating in the round were existing investors, including Hailo Chairman Zohar Zisapel, Swiss-based ABB Technology Ventures (ATV), London’s Latitude Ventures, Israel’s OurCrowd, and new investors, including Carasso Motors, Comasco, Shlomo Group, Talcar Corp., and Automotive Equipment. Former Intel SVP Mooly Eden will join Hailo's board and Mellanox cofounder and former CEO Eyal Waldman will join its advisory board. The round brings Hailo’s total funding to $224 million.
The new funds will enable Hailo to meet demand for is Hailo-8 AI processor for edge devices and further develop its next-generation products and expand into both new and existing global markets. The Hailo-8 allows operations for vehicles, electrical consumer goods, smart cameras and more as well as applications like machine learning, which until now have required "heavy" servers to operate them. The chips can be used for smart cities, smart retail and industry 4.0.
Hailo, which was founded in 2017 by CEO Orr Danon, CBO Hadar Zeitlin and CTO Avi Baum, graduates of elite technology intelligence units of the Israel Defense Forces,
Danon said, "We are honored by this milestone round for an edge AI chip company and will use these significant resources to accelerate our aggressive plan to make advanced AI edge solutions more accessible to industries across the globe. This tremendous support is a testament to our unparalleled edge AI product line, and we look forward to empowering even smarter and swifter devices, and thus, a more robust future powered by AI."
Hailo-8 has an architecture based on the neural networks of the human brain, and delivers the same performance for smart devices as that provided by large data center computers, paving the way for a future of smarter edge products. Hailo’s chip enables enterprises to harness the power of AI at lower costs and higher efficiency.
Due to rapidly increasing demand, Hailo has been consistently expanding its product line, recently launching both its M.2 and Mini PCIe high-performance AI acceleration modules for empowering edge devices. "In the coming years, AI will become the defining feature for creating new business value and reshaping user experience as we know it. The ability to bring AI-based features to market will increasingly be the deciding factor over whether companies succeed or fail," said former Intel executive Mooly Eden. "Hailo’s innovative and hyper-efficient processor architecture addresses the growing demand for a new kind of chip to handle these new types of workloads, challenging traditional computing solutions."
Hailo has doubled its customer base to more than 100 clients over the last two fiscal quarters of 2021 as more enterprises seek out AI solutions that empower sensors and smart devices at lower costs, lower energy, and greater power. The company has opened offices in Tokyo, Taipei, Munich, and Silicon Valley and also recently announced a partnership with Macnica, a leading global semiconductor distributor in Japan.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on October 12, 2021
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