AIStorm Raises $13.2M to Develop AI-on-Sensor Technology

BusinessWire: San Jose, CA-based startup AIStorm raises $13.2M in Series A round from Egis Technology, TowerJazz, Meyer Corpo, and Linear Dimensions Semiconductor Inc.

“This investment will help us accelerate our engineering & 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,” said David Schie, CEO of AIStorm.

Using sensor data directly—without digitization is said to enable real-time processing at the edge. AI systems require information be available in digital form before they can process data, but sensor data is analog. Processing this digital information requires advanced and costly GPUs that are not suitable for mobile devices: they require continuous digitization of input data, which consumes significant power and introduces unavoidable digitization delay (latency). AIStorm aims to solve these problems by processing sensor data directly in its native analog form, in real time.

“It makes sense to combine the AI processing with the imager and skip the costly digitization process. For our customers, this will open up new possibilities in smart, event-driven operation and high-speed processing at the edge,” said Avi Strum, SVP/GM of the sensors business unit of TowerJazz.

“The reaction time saved by AIStorm’s approach can mean the difference between an advanced driver-assistance system detecting an object and safely stopping versus a lethal collision,” said Russell Ellwanger, CEO of TowerJazz.

“Edge applications must process huge amounts of data generated by sensors. Digitizing that data takes time, which means that these applications don’t have time to intelligently select data from the sensor data stream, and instead have to collect volumes of data and process it later. For the first time, AIStorm’s approach allows us to intelligently prune data from the sensor stream in real time and keep up with the massive sensor input tasks,” said Todd Lin, COO of Egis Technology Inc.

AIStorm’s management includes CEO David Schie, a former senior executive at Maxim, Micrel and Semtech; CFO Robert Barker, formerly with Micrel and WSI; Andreas Sibrai, formerly with Maxim and Toshiba; and Cesar Matias, founder of ARM’s Budapest design center. AIStorm is based in San Jose, CA with offices in Austria, Taiwan, Phoenix and soon Dresden and Israel.