Egis Technology participates in AIStorm’s $13.2M financing round

Feb 14, 2019 | Stephen Mayhew

AIStorm has closed $13.2 million Series A financing round with biometrics supplier Egis Technology, imaging sensor company TowerJazz, Meyer Corporation and Linear Dimensions Semiconductor participating. David Schie, CEO of AIStorm, said that the investment will be used to accelerate engineering and go-to-market efforts.

AIStorm addresses the need to process sensor information at the edge to reduce the cost and security risk associated with transmitting large amounts of raw data from edge sensors. AI systems require information be available in digital form before they can process data, but sensor data is analogue.

Processing this digital information requires advanced and costly GPUs that are not suitable for mobile devices as they require continuous digitization of input data, which consumes significant power and introduces unavoidable digitization delay.

AIStorm aims to solve these problems by processing sensor data directly in its native analogue form, in real time. Schie says this approach results in “cost savings of five to ten times compared to GPUs — without any compromise in performance.”

“Edge applications must process huge amounts of data generated by sensors,” explains Todd Lin, COO of Egis Technology. “Digitizing that data takes time, which means that these applications don’t have time to intelligently select data from the sensor data stream, and instead have to collect volumes of data and process it later. For the first time, AIStorm’s approach allows us to intelligently prune data from the sensor stream in real time and keep up with the massive sensor input tasks.”

“The reaction time saved by AIStorm’s approach can mean the difference between an advanced driver-assistance system detecting an object and safely stopping versus a lethal collision,” added Russell Ellwanger, CEO of TowerJazz.

“It makes sense to combine the AI processing with the imager and skip the costly digitization process,” said Dr. Avi Strum, SVP/GM of the sensors business unit of TowerJazz. “For our customers, this will open up new possibilities in smart, event-driven operation and high-speed processing at the edge.”

AIStorm’s management includes CEO David Schie, a former senior executive at Maxim, Micrel and Semtech; CFO Robert Barker, formerly with Micrel and WSI; Andreas Sibrai, formerly with Maxim and Toshiba, and; Cesar Matias, founder of ARM’s Budapest design center.