Innatera raises €5M to bring neuromorphic AI to the edge

Innatera Nanosystems has raised 5 million euros in seed funding to bring its brain-inspired processing technology to sensors and sensor-based devices. The Delft University of Technology spinoff’s neuromorphic processing chip closely mimics the brain’s mechanisms for pattern recognition, enabling sensor data to be processed 100x faster and with up to 500x less energy than with conventional processors. These efficiency and performance gains allow advanced AI to be embedded into the sensor edge, unlocking a wide gamut of applications including intelligent speech processing in human-machine interfaces, vitals monitoring in wearable devices, target recognition in radars and lidars, and fault detection in industrial and automotive equipment.

According to Innatera, its solution is radically different from the traditional AI chips being proposed by its competitors and fundamentally changes how sensor data is processed. The technology relies on a new breed of analog/mixed-signal computing circuits that recreate the behavior of the brain’s fundamental building blocks – spiking neurons and synapses. Neural networks built with spiking neurons possess a precise notion of time, which enables them to be 10-100x more compact than conventional artificial neural networks, especially for applications involving data with high spatial and temporal correlations. As a result of this approach, Innatera’s architecture delivers a combination of ultra-low-power and ultra-short recognition latency, with up to 10,000x higher performance per watt than typical digital processors and conventional AI accelerators.