Sensors working overtime as AIStorm raises $13m funding
California’s AIStorm is having a blast as it has raised $13.2 million in funding for its sensor technology ride.
Not a fan of GPUs
The firm is not limited to fintech because it is led by a team of semiconductor executives and backed by sensor and equipment manufacturers.
The Series A financing came from Egis Technology, a biometrics supplier; TowerJazz, which specialises in image sensors; Meyer Corporation, a food preparation equipment supplier; and Linear Dimensions Semiconductor, a biometric authentication and digital health product provider.
“This investment will help us accelerate our engineering and go-to-market efforts to bring a new type of machine learning to the edge. AIStorm’s revolutionary approach allows implementation of edge solutions in lower-cost analog technologies. The result is a cost savings of five to ten times compared to GPUs – without any compromise in performance,” says David Schie, CEO of AIStorm.
It aims to equip handsets, internet of things (IoT) devices, wearables, and vehicles with its artificial intelligence (AI) processing.
On its website, for example, it wants to improve biometric login by small wearable devices like watches, bands and glasses.
Also on its site, it notes that cell phones and standalone devices offer high-performance voice solutions. However, they are often dependent upon the cloud for operation.
It explains: “By pushing more capability into the device, bandwidth requirements can be reduced and the technology can be used for transportation and other applications where the cloud connection may not be reliable.”
According to AIStorm, the semiconductor industry is striving to process sensor information at the edge to reduce the cost and security risk associated with transmitting large amounts of raw data from edge sensors.
AI systems require information be available in digital form before they can process data, but sensor data is analog.
In its view, processing this digital information requires “advanced and costly” GPUs that are not suitable for mobile devices.
This is because they require continuous digitisation of input data, which consumes “significant” power and introduces unavoidable digitisation delay (latency).
As you guessed, AIStorm aims to solve these problems by processing sensor data directly in its native analog form, in real time.
The company is based in San Jose, with offices in Phoenix (Arizona), Austria and Taiwan. It also plans to open offices in Dresden and Israel. No timelines on that.
