Latent AI, Inc. Announces Seed Funding led by Future Ventures

MENLO PARK, Calif., June 26, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Latent AI has spun out of SRI International, the leading independent research and technology center, and closed its first round of venture funding. The company also launches today with the Latent AI Efficient Inference Platform™ (LEIP) and their first platform product, LEIP Compress™, a quantization optimizer for edge devices that enables smart and efficient IoT applications. LEIP empowers developers working on edge AI projects to optimize within compute, energy, and memory budget without requiring changes to existing AI/ML infrastructure, processors or development frameworks.

"One of the major goals for Latent AI is to simplify and accelerate the AI workflow from training to deployment. With many thousands of compelling edge AI applications yet to be developed, we are helping make the development process as efficient and seamless as possible," stated Jags Kandasamy, CEO and Co-Founder of Latent AI.

The Latent AI technologies are built on SRI International's extensive ML methodology research on how to deploy computer-based systems in complex situations.

"SRI International has long been at the forefront of research in the rapidly evolving field of machine learning, computer vision, and robotics," said SRI Ventures President Manish Kothari, Ph.D. "We are proud to share SRI's deep expertise and cutting-edge research in these areas with Latent AI to accelerate a solution that will bring the visionary promise of computing and AI to real-world applications."

The foundation of this fundamental technology was initiated under DARPA projects led by Sek Chai, CTO & Co-Founder of Latent AI, who stated, "Our approach using Adaptive AI™ is a fundamental shift in the way AI is trained and computing resources are dynamically determined for highly resource-constrained hardware." Latent AI technologies can compress large neural networks up to 90% with less than 1% accuracy loss.

Latent AI recently closed its $3.5 million seed round of financing, led by Steve Jurvetson at Future Ventures and including industry leaders such as SRI International Ventures, Perot Jain and Gravity Ranch.

Steve Jurvetson serves on the Boards of Tesla, SpaceX and D-Wave and was the early VC investor in Planet, Memphis Meats, Hotmail, and the deep learning companies Mythic and Nervana.

"With the internet of things, we are creating a sensory nervous system on the planet, with countless sensors and data collecting proliferating across the planet. All of this 'big data' would be a big headache but for machine learning to find patterns in it all and make it actionable, and edge computing to shift the processing to the periphery and avoid network overload," said Steve Jurvetson. "The edge needs AI, and AI needs the edge. Latent AI integrates both with a portfolio of IoT edge compute optimizers and accelerators that bring an order of magnitude improvement to existing infrastructure. This is essential, as the majority of new software today is AI and most compute cycles will shift to the edge."

Latent AI is working with the top players in high-end consumer electronics, AR/VR, gaming, auto, drones, and robotics.  Users can access LEIP™ Compress and the SDK on the Latent AI website.

SRI International

SRI International creates world-changing solutions making people safer, healthier, and more productive. SRI, a research center headquartered in Menlo Park, California, works primarily in advanced technology and systems, biosciences, computing, and education. SRI brings its innovations to the marketplace through technology licensing, spin-off ventures and new product solutions.

Latent AI Inc.

Based in Menlo Park, CA, Latent AI, Inc. is an early stage venture spinout of SRI International, dedicated to building solutions that enable the adaptive edge to transform AI processing.  Latent AI is well-funded by industry-leading investors with support from Fortune 500 clients. The Latent AI Efficient Inference Platform (LEIP™) brings AI to the edge by optimizing for compute, energy, and memory without requiring changes to existing AI/ML infrastructure and frameworks. The company is founded by Jags Kandasamy and Sek Chai. They bring decades of combined industry experience and R&D expertise in machine learning AI (lifelong learning), computer vision, embedded systems, IoT applications, and efficient computing.

Future Ventures

Future Ventures focuses on seed and early-stage investments in trailblazing, purpose-driven entrepreneurs with ideas that have the potential to reinvent entire industries.  The Future Ventures partners have led founding investments in companies such as Memphis Meats, Mythic, Nervana, Planet, Skype, SpaceX, Tesla and Zoox, representing $100-billion of aggregate value creation.

SOURCE SRI International

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