SRI Capital invests in Edge AI startup edgetensor
Hyderabad: SRI Capital today announced that it has made a strategic investment of an undisclosed amount into the edge AI (artificial intelligence) technology startup edgetensor.
Rajesh Narasimha and Soumitry J. Ray are the founders of edgetensor. Headquartered in Dallas, Texas with a development center in Bengaluru, the startup's mission is to make state-of-the-art edge based AI affordable and accessible to the mass market. Narasimha and Ray have obtained their PhDs from the Georgia Institute of Technology and between them, share more than 75 patents and publications and over a decade of industry experience. Both were part of metaio, a German AR startup acquired by Apple in 2015. The extended team of edgetensor comprises of computer vision and machine learning experts and software engineers that bring together experience in cross-platform and mobile development along with cloud backend expertise.
In simple terms, an edge device is any that can perform computations locally without sending data to the cloud for processing and bypassing cloud computing roadblocks such as speed, latency, privacy, reliability and safety concerns. What sets edgetensor apart from its competition is its proprietary AI inference engine that uses deep learning algorithms optimized for low-cost edge computing devices such as a smartphone that can process 30 to 40 frames per second by only sending event-driven information to the cloud. Edgetensor's solution works with a wide range of edge hardware devices and is compatible with most of the cameras.
Its SDK handles a number of functions, including:
Face tracking with occlusion reasoning
Head-pose tracking and location
Gaze direction and location
Age and gender
Face recognition
Face identification/verification
Emotion recognition
And beyond facial tracking, the SDK can also be used for human detection and pose tracking, vehicle detection and identification, and license plate recognition. This means the tech has applications in markets such as video security as well as applications in mobility, personalized robotics, smart cities, smart retail, and marketing. edgetensor's state of the art AI based edge SDK provides a minimum of 6X reduction in cost or more on the edge plus a 1000X in cloud savings.
"Edge computing is growing rapidly and with many large companies investing in low-power edge compute devices there is a need for software innovation to run AI algorithms that are compute, memory and data intensive on off-the-shelf commodity devices in a scalable and affordable way and we at edgetensor are committed to making this happen" commented Rajesh Narasimha, CEO at edgetensor.
We are excited to have SRI Capital as our lead investor since they bring a wealth of expertise in enterprise tech to help us scale the business" added Narasimha.
"Another important aspect of edge computing is the volume of data sent to the cloud, more so in case of video data from camera sensors, and the power consumed to process the data is high which is reflected in the cost of cloud services, said CTO, Soumitry J Ray. "Edge devices being inherently low powered alleviate these issues by crunching the data themselves and thus reduce the cloud footprint of AI algorithms." he added.
Commenting on the announcement, Sashi Reddi, Founder and Managing Partner at SRI Capital said, "There are very few entrepreneurs globally who can match Rajesh and Soumitry in their expertise in AI and vision processing on the edge. We believe that edgetensor has the potential to be a serious player in this multi-billion dollar market for affordable AI on low end edge devices."
In the last five years, SRI Capital has invested in over 30startups, and will continue scouting innovative startups to fund, collaborate and support cross-border innovation between India and U.S.
