Edge Impulse is a TNW member that produces an AI-platform for developers. The American chip giant Qualcomm has acquired it for an undisclosed amount.
Qualcomm stated that it bought Edge Impulse in order to improve its machine learning capabilities, especially for its Dragonwing line AI-powered processors.
Nakul Duggal, Qualcomm’s head of IoT said that the acquisition would strengthen Qualcomm’s “leadership” in AI and bolster “critical industries such as retail, energy, utilities, supply chain, and asset management.” Zach Shelby, Edge Impulse co-founder and CEO, said
: “Our team and our mission remain the same. We will now have even more capabilities to accelerate what we do best.” Shelby, a Finnish engineer and entrepreneur, founded Edge Impulse with Dutchman Jan Jongboom in 2019. The pair met at British chip company Arm, where they were working on IoT system.
At Edge Impulse Shelby and Jongboom created a platform that reduces the time required to create machine-learning models for small devices, such as sensors and microcontrollers. Shelby said that the team had identified an important gap in the market.
Recognising the compute capabilities of microcontrollers were at a point where they could run domain-specific AI model directly onboard, we realised that there were an infinite number of use cases which would benefit from moving AI to the edge. blog post. Edge Impulse raised
$ 54.3MN to date. In 2021, Edge Impulse received $34mn of Series B funding valued at $234mn. Two years later it reported revenues of $14.7mn . Over 170,000 developers use its platform to create, deploy and monitor AI models at the edge. Shelby attributed the platform’s success to its ability to eliminate manual and laborious tasks for developers when setting up AI on edge devices.
“Edge Impulse provides developers with a tool which automates data gathering, simplifies model-training, provides advanced optimization tools, and offers a one-click deployment on many types of hardware from MCUs to GPUs, CPUs, and NPUs,” said Shelby.
