CIE Components in Electronics
What is Recogni announcing?
Recogni is announcing a Series B funding round of $48.9M for the development and delivery of its AI-based vision recognition system for autonomous vehicles. Series B financing will be dedicated to bringing Recogni’s technology to market and expanding the Recogni business and engineering teams. Series B new investors are: WRVI Capital (website); Mayfield Fund (website); Continental Automobiles (website); Robert Bosch Venture Capital (RBVC), and our existing investors GreatPoint Ventures (website); Toyota AI Ventures (website) BMW i Ventures (website); Fluxunit – OSRAM Ventures (website); DNS Capital (website) and others.
Recogni was founded in 2017, and raised $25 million in Series A funding in July 2019. These proceeds were primarily dedicated to building out our teams, product development & customer proof of concept demonstrations.
Recogni has built an experienced cross-functional team of experts. The company has expertise in system software, ASIC design, AI/ML algorithms and robust system integration.
Why is Recogni Unique?
Just like human drivers, autonomous vehicles must be able to see and accurately understand their surroundings. Self-driving vehicles must capture actionable information from their vision perception systems and then process that information to navigate safely in all driving conditions.
The use of high-resolution sensors can provide greater amounts of information to accurately identify obstructions, occluded objects, and pedestrians that will enable a vehicle to safely navigate on roadways in urban and highway settings. However, processing huge amounts of visual data requires data center-like compute capabilities and high power consumption that is not feasible in autonomous driving systems.
Recogni’s AI vision cognition module (VCM) is designed to capture and process high-resolution camera and sensor data. Applying innovations in AI algorithms, ASIC architecture and design, and system software, the VCM will deliver high performance processing with ultra-low power consumption, enabling high-resolution, high-frame-rate image processing from multiple cameras concurrently in real time. The VCM is being designed to deliver exceptional perception performance and accuracy under all traffic, weather, and lighting conditions.
What is special about Recogni’s technology?
Recogni’s VCM can be used to develop self-driving cars, trucks, robotaxis, and robotic delivery vehicles. OEMs will have accurate perception capabilities for any level of autonomy from driver assistance to full autonomy.
Most OEMs will prefer to integrate best-of-breed subsystems. For OEMs who source their components from third parties, Recogni intends to stand apart from alternate technologies in these important ways:
- offer the most accurate object recognition in all lighting and weather conditions, and traffic conditions
- consume far less power than other AI-enabled perception systems, enabling self-driving vehicles to have more range
What does the future hold for Recogni?
The advent of electric vehicles in concert with autonomous vehicle adoption will create the notion of a “technology-first automobile” that benefits from advancements in fundamental technologies such as artificial intelligence, vision, ASIC architecture and design, and software integration.
These advances will affect society in many fundamental ways. Autonomous driving will offer safer driving experiences in urban and rural settings, provide more vehicle ownership options, along with greater access to mobility and lower transportation costs.
Recogni’s ability to deliver power-efficient, high-performance perception capabilities will position the company to be a key player in moving autonomous driving forward across the transportation industry.
