BMW i Ventures announced an investment in Recogni Inc., the designers of a vision-oriented artificial intelligence platform for autonomous vehicles.
Recogni is focused on creating high-performance and low-power AI processing to help make autonomous vehicles a reality.
“The ability to process sensor data on the edge efficiently and in real-time is esential in the development of autonomous vehicles,” said Marcus Behrendt, partner BMW i Ventures. “We believe that Recogni has the right approach and an experienced team to help solve these critical issues as the automotive industry continues on its parth towards semi-autonomous and fully autonomous and vehicles”
Founded in 2018 and headquartered in San Jose, Calif., the company has operations in Munich, Germany and is positioning itself to revolutionize perception processing for Level 2+ autonomous vehicles. Using a Vision Cognition Processor, Recogni will solve the endpoint inferencing problem with autonomous vehicles efficiently and change the trajectory of full level 3, 4, and 5 autonomy. The company’s founders possess deep industry experience in system design, AI, vision, and custom silicon design.
“The issues within the Level 2+, 3, 4 and 5 autonomy ecosystem range from capturing/generating training data to inferring in real-time. These vehicles need datacenter class performance while consuming minuscule amounts of power,” said RK Anand, CEO of Recogni. “Leveraging our background in machine learning, computer vision, silicon, and system design, we are engineering a fundamentally new system that benefits the auto industry with very high efficiency at the lowest power consumption. This round, one of the largest initial venture rounds raised by any AI silicon company in the space, is testament to our experience and responsible approach.”
Recogni plans to use the funds to deliver the most capable inferencing system to enable state of the art sensor fusion of visual and depth sensor data while continuing to grow its top-tier engineering team.
BMW i Ventures, BMW’s EUR 500 million venture capital fund, invests money and resources in startups in the fields of autonomous driving, digital car and automotive cloud, e-mobility, artificial Intelligence and data, industry 4.0, shared and on-demand mobility, customer digital life, and energy services.
BMW i Ventures has already entered into strategic partnerships with innovative providers such as Scoop, Zirx, RiceCell, Chargepoint, Life360, Moovit, JustPark, DSP Concepts, Chargemaster, Zendrive, Rever Moto, STRIVR, Desktop Metal, BUS.com, Proterra, Xometry, Caroobi, GaN Systems, Shift, May Mobility, Blackmore Sensors and Analytics, Vera, Mapillary, Claroty, Graphcore, Tekion and Yellowbrick Data. BMW i Ventures invests in all stages from seedto growth companies.
