AIStorm snags $16M Series B to add AI to tiny sensors
Analog hardware innovator AIStorm closed out 2020 with $16M extra in the bank. After its $13.2M Series A announcement and product news in early 2019, the company has been focused on building customers and strategic partners. These efforts paid off with a respectable Series B and several commercial agreements underway.
The difference is the approach: switch-charged processing in the analog domain
AIStorm has the best technical solution to a challenging problem: delivering the fastest processing of complex AI problems at the very edge of the network (within the sensors themselves), and doing this with minimal power consumption. And this is not the classic memory-based digital solution; AIStorm uses an electron-multiplication scheme to directly accept charge from sensors and manipulate it immediately without digitization — until the information is needed in that form.
This is a completely different approach from that of competing vendors claiming to offer “AI at the edge.” AIStorm is focused on IoT applications where portability, ultra-low power, and very low cost are essential — and where competing approaches do not have a viable offering.
AIStorm offers the only machine-learning solutions capable of direct sensor coupling. AIStorm has perfected a unique, patented technology called switch charge. This makes AIStorm the only solution that can directly attach as an "always on" processor to the pixel or audio mic MEMS membrane while executing at efficiencies in power and die size that no one else can match.
“AIStorm’s approach is the only technology which allows the sensor to couple directly to popular convolutional neural networks. This allows AIStorm to deliver true, template-based ‘always-on’ at the edge—at prices that deep-submicron digital competitors cannot match for the same performance. This is a winning formula in the highly competitive IoT sector.”
Top players from various sectors are strategic investors
The investors in this round are principally industrial companies that are eager to integrate AIStorm's tech into a range of devices for specific applications:
• AsusTek is a leader in laptops and residential IoT devices
• Egis is the leader in biometric sensing, with its chips used by most of the major handset makers worldwide
• Knowles is the global leader in the MEMs microphone market
• Meyer Corporation is a world leader in cookware and food-processing equipment
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