Microsoft’s venture fund M12 and Applied Ventures, the venture capital arm of Applied Materials, led the financing, and Atlantic Bridge Capital, Alpha Edison and Miramar Digital Ventures joined as new investors in the company. Syntiant also announced that Michael Stewart, Ph.D., investment director at Applied Ventures, has joined the company’s board of directors, and that David Lam, general partner of Atlantic Bridge Capital, will serve as a board observer.
"It is a tremendous honor to know that some of the world’s leading tech investors are supporting our growth stage, as we deliver our deep learning voice solution to customers across the globe," says Kurt Busch, CEO of Syntiant. "We are especially thrilled that production volumes of applications using our neural decision processors are increasing and expect orders to ramp even higher throughout the remainder of 2020, as our NDPs continue to set the standard for always on voice as the new interface."
Syntiant is enabling customized voice control interfaces at the edge, across multiple product and use cases, including wake words, command words, speaker identification and event detection, all free from cloud connectivity, ensuring privacy and security.
"Syntiant’s class leading power performance is making an ambient fabric of neural network-powered intelligence at the tiny edge a reality," says Samir Kumar, managing director of M12. "We are now seeing Syntiant deliver on its execution strategy, setting new benchmarks that are unprecedented for a young AI chip company with the volume of products already shipped, and new customers coming on board."
The company’s highly accurate NDPs have been designed into a wide range of battery-powered edge devices, such as smartphones, smart speakers, laptops and earbuds. Built from the ground up, Syntiant’s processors offer approximately 100x the power efficiency and 10x the throughput at half the die size, presenting a solution with the highest performance, lowest power and lowest cost compared to current MCU and DSP solutions.
"Syntiant is one of the few edge computing companies to have successfully designed-in their product in high-volume applications," says Anand Kamannavar, global head of Applied Ventures. “We are pleased to co-lead the company’s latest funding round and have Dr. Michael Stewart join such a talented board. Applied Ventures looks forward to helping Syntiant grow existing and prospective customers across multiple use categories that can benefit from low-power processing technology for voice and sensor applications. Investments in innovative companies like Syntiant are a key part of Applied Ventures’ Materials to Systems TM investment strategy.”
"Syntiant is truly leading the edge compute space with its AI chip solution," adds David Lam. "I am excited about joining the team and leveraging our firm’s successful track record of backing world-class companies in semiconductors and artificial intelligence to support the expansion of Syntiant’s disruptive technology as deep learning moves from the cloud to the edge."
www.syntiant.com
