Qualcomm acquires impulse from the AI ​​platform to boost dragonwing chips

Edge Impulse, a member of the TNW community that produces an AI platform for developers, has been acquired by the American giant of Qualcomm Chips for an unrelated sum.

Qualcomm said that Edge Impulse had bought to increase their automatic learning software capabilities, particularly for its chips dragonwing line with AI.

Nakul Duggal, head of IoT of Qualcomm, said that the acquisition would strengthen the “leadership in AI” of his company and reinforce the “critical sectors such as retail trade, security, energy and public services, the management of the supply chain and asset management.”

According to the agreement, Edge Impulse will integrate its operations with Qualcomm’s, but will maintain its own offices, employees and website.

“Our team and the mission are still the same, only now, we will have even more opportunities and capabilities to accelerate what we do best.” Said Zach Shelby, Edge Impulse’s’s co -founder and CEO.

Shelby, engineer and entrepreneur of Finland, founded Edge promoted in 2019 along with the Dutchman Jan Jongboom. The couple gathered while working in IoT systems in British Chip Firm Arm.

In Edge Impulse, Shelby and Jongboom built a platform the time that takes the time to create automatic learning models for small devices such as sensors, microcontrollers and cameras.

Shelby said the team had identified a great gap in the market.

“Recognizing that the calculation capacities of the microcontrollers had grown to the point where they could execute models of domain -specific AI directly on board, we realized that there was an endless number of use cases that would benefit from moving the AI ​​from the cloud to the edge. ” He wrote in a Blog.

The edge impulse has increased $ 54.3mn to date. In 2021, the company won $ 34 million in B series funds to an assessment of $ 234mn. Two years later, reported Income of $ 14.7mn. Its platform is currently Used by more than 170,000 developers to create, implement and monitor AI models on the edge.

Shelby accredited the popularity of the platform to help developers eliminate laborious and manual tasks by establishing AI on Edge devices.

“Edge Impulse offers developers a tool that automates data collection, simplifies model training, provides advanced optimization tools and offers a single implementation of a single click on many types of hardware, from MCU to CPU, GPU and NPU,” he said.