Kneron, the San Diego-based full-stack AI company, today announced $49M in strategic funding from investors including Foxconn and Alltek, bringing their total Series B financing to $97 million. The full round was led by Horizons Ventures, with participation across several extensions from Liteon Technology Corp, Adata, Palpilot, and Foxconn. Kneron will use the additional funds to accelerate the deployment of advanced AI, focusing on nano GPT solutions for automotive in particular.
Kneron provides end-to-end integrated hardware and software solutions that enable on-device edge AI inferencing. The company launched the first edge AI chip supporting transformer neural networks, which underpins all GPT models, in 2021.
“Powerful GPT models are mostly still running out of cloud data centers. This results in a slew of issues, including high latency, high data transfer costs, and inadequacies in user privacy and security protection. Kneron’s solutions resolve these industry bottlenecks by creating hyper-efficient AI chips. We’re thrilled to announce the completion of our Series B funding announcement to continue our work in making AI technology more secure, accessible, and energy-efficient,” says Albert Liu, Founder and CEO of Kneron.
The soaring demand for AI computing faces one major constraint: the availability of high-quality AI chips. While GPU chips currently dominate the market, Kneron is pioneering NPU (neural processing unit) chips that are more uniquely suited to AI computing. Most recently, Kneron launched the KL730, an auto-grade NPU chip that supports the most advanced lightweight GPT LLMs, like nanoGPT, bringing further options to a high-demand market.
With this tranche in funding, Kneron is specifically focused on expanding its efforts in enabling AI to make autonomous driving a reality. Their latest ultra-lightweight AI chips apply transformers (commonly applied to language processing) to image-based applications, taking advantage of transformers’ capabilities to better process time-series and consider image data holistically. By improving contextualization and processing, Kneron increases the accuracy of image-based applications by at least 30% – a significant leap for autonomous driving.
Kneron is also expanding its partnership with Foxconn to accelerate the deployment of advanced AI, including nano GPT, for automotive, and other applications. In a key move to this initiative, Kneron is working with Foxconn to create an ultra-lightweight AI chip that operates GPT models off the cloud.
This round finalizes Kneron’s Series B funding led by Horizons Ventures. Previously, Kneron raised $48M from Liteon Technology Corporation and Adata. The addition of $49M from Foxconn and Alltek brings Kneron’s total funding to date is $190M.
