AI chip startup counts Microsoft, Alexa, and Intel among backers
Other investors include: the Amazon Alexa Fund, Applied Ventures, Intel Capital, Motorola Solutions Venture Capital and Robert Bosch Venture Capital. Intel Capital also invested in a Series A round of $5.1 million (see Intel Capital steers focus back towards silicon).
Syntiant also announced the expansion of its board to five members with the appointments of Samir Kumar, managing director of M12, and Bret Johnsen, CFO of Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), who will serve as an independent director.
“With participation from existing and new investors, and deeper guidance from our expanded board with the additions of Samir Kumar and Bret Johnsen, we will be able to commercialize Syntiant’s neural network technology for battery-powered devices to truly enable pervasive artificial intelligence,” said Kurt Busch, CEO of Syntiant, in a statement.
Syntiant’s processors are called neural decision processors (NDPs) and the company has said their architecture is intended to “eliminate” data movement penalties. Syntiant analog nueral networks offer memory efficiency with modest precision and are suitable for applications within hearing aids and IoT, smart speakers and mobile phones.
Syntiant has demonstrated a prototype NDP that can simultaneously support dozens of audio and keyword classifications and is capable of speaker identification, audio event detection and environment classification, and sensor analytics.
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