Grai Matter Labs gets $14M boost to edge AI

Grai Matter Labs (GML) has announced its latest financing round of 14 million dollars. The round was led by the iBionext healthcare startup studio in Paris, where the artificial intelligence specialist incubated, joined by all existing investors and newly welcomed Bpifrance through the Future Investment Program and Celeste Management. The fabless semiconductor scale-up with Eindhoven roots will utilize the funds to accelerate design and market launch of its first full-stack AI system-on-chip platform, to deliver on customer needs at the edge.

GML’s mission is to bring fastest AI per watt for sensor analytics and machine learning to every device on the edge. According to the company, its programmable Neuronflow technology enables industry-leading inference latency efficiently, more than an order of magnitude better than competing solutions. Its current accelerator chip Grai One and the Grai One HDK are available for product evaluation and application programming. The upcoming full-stack AI SoC platform will drive a significant step in visual inference capabilities in robotics, industrial automation, AR/VR and surveillance products and markets.

GML started out as Brainiac, incubated in 2016 within iBionext. Among its founders are Vision Institute professor Ryad Benosman, iBionext chairman Bernard Gilly and Atul Sinha – a team combining experiences in neuromorphic computing, silicon design and entrepreneurship. In December 2017, the company closed its Series-A financing round of 15 million dollars, led by iBionext, and in April of last year, it adopted its current name. Next to its HQ in the French capital, it has offices in Silicon Valley (San Jose) and Eindhoven. With Paris and the Valley focusing more on ML applications and business development, the Brainport branch is responsible for architecture exploration, hardware design and AI tools.