Today the Israeli artificial intelligence chipmaker Hailo made a speech. The company said that it had raised a $60 million Series B funding round led by its existing investors. New strategic investors joined existing investors. The new investors included NEC Corporation and Londons’ Latitude Ventures, the venture art of the Swiss-based multination ABB, and ABB Technology Ventures. The new funding is to help Hailo rolling out its Hailo-8 Deep learning chip. It is also to get into new industries and markets.
Orr Danon is the CEO and co-founder of Hailo. He said that the immense vote of confidence from their new financial and strategic investors, along with existing ones, will be a testimony to their market potential and breakthrough innovation. Danon added that the new funding would help them expedite the deployment of new levels of edge computing capabilities in creative industries and smart devices. It will include areas such, smart retail, industrial automation, smart cities, mobility, and beyond.
In January, the Hailo Team was showing off several impressive demos, mostly around real-time image recognition. The Hailo chip can stand out because of its innovative architecture. It can automatically adapt resources to run its users’ custom neural networks best. With that, the disk does not only run faster, but it is far more energy-efficient. From its chip performance, the company promises 26 tero operations per second in return. The company says that it outperforms all other edge processors with its high production, low power consumption, and small size.
Hailo
Currently, Hailo’s total funding consists of $88 million. Partially, the investor enthusiasm for Hailo is undoubtedly driven by the success of other startups of Israeli chip. Mobileye went to Intel for $15,2 billion, after all. And the company was also recently acquired by Habana Labs. Of course, the time is ripe for chips of deep learning at the edge now that artificial intelligence/machine learning technology is quickly becoming stakes of table.
Julian Rower is a partner at Latitude Ventures. She said that in the rapidly emerging market of artificial intelligence processors, Hailo is poised to become a defining player. Today, their Deep Leaning edge chip can be disruptive to so many sectors. Meanwhile, innovative Hailo’s chips can unlock just starting to reveal themselves. She also added that they are happy to join the team for what lies ahead.
The company also says that its new funding will most likely bolster the ongoing global rollout of its breakthrough Hailo-8 Deep learning chip. They also say that they will reach new industries and markets worldwide.
There are plenty of applications where a bunch of graphics processing units (GPU) is running in a data center, but it’s not practical. For example, let’s take autonomous vehicles: IT does not make sense of piping all the data streaming off the onboard cameras.
Hailo claims that per second, its chip is capable of up to 26 trillion operations while drawing less than 5 watts at full utilization. Hailo-8 meets several compliance standards for automotive applications. It also supports popular machine learning frameworks like Open Neural Network Exchange and TensorFlow.
