Expedera raises $18M for deep learning accelerator from founders of Marvell

Expedera, a start-up based in Santa Clara, California announced a $18 million Series A funding round led by Dr. Sehat Sutardja and Weili Dai (founders of Marvell Technology Group) and other prominent semiconductor industry investors. 

Expedera is developing a deep learning accelerator IP that is scalable up to 128 TOPS with a single core and to PetaOps with multi-core. The company says it will achieve the highest performance per watt. The solution is aimed at a wide range of AI inference applications, particularly at the edge. Expedera’s Origin IP and software platform supports popular AI frontends including TensorFlow, ONNX, Keras, Mxnet, Darknet, CoreML and Caffe2 through Apache TVM. By licensing its technology as a semiconductor IP, Expedera enables any chip designer to add state-of-the-art AI functionality to their product.

The latest funding brings the total amount raised to over $27 million.

“This financing underscores the success that Expedera has had so far and will enable us to expand our portfolio and team to meet the market needs,” said Da Chuang, CEO of Expedera. “We are incredibly happy to have Weili Dai and Sehat Sutardja lead this round. As highly respected veterans of the semiconductor industry, they have a unique understanding of the market and customer needs. I look forward to a long partnership.”

“Device makers have typically needed to build their own chips and usually, only the largest companies could afford to do so,” said Mr. Gwennap. “Expedera’s IP model provides a more cost effective way to address the sprawling edge AI market. A single IP supplier can license to any or all of the numerous chip vendors that supply a multitude of device makers in the edge market.”

http://www.expedera.com