Microsoft venture capital fund, M12 Ventures has led a myriad of strategic business investors who support a new chip developer from Southern California called Syntiant, which produces semiconductors for speech recognition and speech-based applications.
"We have started building a new type of machine learning processor and voice is our first application," says Kurt Busch, CEO of Syntiant. "We has decided to create a chip for alwya's battery powered devices. "
These chips require a different type of processor than traditional chipsets, Busch says. Traditional computing is about logic and deep learning is about accessing memory, even traditional microchip designs don't work as well when it comes to parallel information processing.
Syntiant says its chips are two orders of magnitude more efficient, thanks to its data flow architecture which was built for deep learning, according to Busch.
It is that efficiency that has attracted investors included M12, risk fund of Microsoft Corp .; Amazon Alexa Fund; Applied Ventures, the investment arm of Applied Materials; Intel Capital, Motorola Solutions Venture Capital and Robert Bosch Venture Capital.
These investment companies represent some of the leading technology software producers and developers and are pooling their resources to support Syntiant's Irvine, California-based operations.
"Syntiant aligns perfectly with our mission to support companies fueling voice technology innovation," said Paul Bernard, director of Amazon's Alexa Fund. "Its technology has enormous potential to encourage the continuous adoption of voice services such as Alexa, particularly in mobile scenarios that require devices to balance at low power with continuous, high-precision voice recognition. We look forward to to work with Syntiant to extend its voice technology to new devices and environments. "
Syntiant's first device measures 1.4 by 1.8 millimeters and consumes 140 microwatts of power. In some applications, the Syntiant chips can run for one year on a single button cell.
"Syntiant's neural network technology and its memory-centered architecture fit perfectly with Applied Materials' core competency in materials engineering as we enable radical advances in device performance and new material-enabled memory technologies," he said. Michael Stewart, director of Applied Ventures, the capital firm of Applied Materials, Inc. "Syntiant's ultra-low-power neural decision processors have the potential to create growth in the chip market and provide an effective solution for voice and video applications of today."
So far, 80 customers are working with Syntiant to integrate the company's chips into their products. There are a few dozen companies in the planning stage and the company has already achieved design wins for products ranging from cell phones and smart speakers to remote controls, hearing aids, laptops and monitors. Already the company has shipped its first million units.
"We plan to downsize it 10 times by the end of this year," says Busch.
Syntiant's chipsets are designed specifically to handle reactivates and commands, which means users can add unique voice recognition features and commands to their specific voice, says Busch.
Initially supported by venture capital firms including Atlantic Bridge, Miramar and Alpha Edison, Syntiant raised its first round of funding in October 2017. The company has raised a total of $ 65 million so far, according to Busch.
"Syntiant's architecture fits perfectly with the computational models and intrinsic parallelism of deep neural networks," said Samir Kumar, an M12 investor and new director of the Syntiant board of directors. "We see great potential in its ability to enable energy performance innovations for AI processing in IoT [Internet of things]".
