Tiger Global leads $35 mn funding in AI semiconductor company Deep Vision

Deep Vision's AI processor helps provide camera-based applications like smart retail, driver-monitoring systems, smart city, drones, and factory automation

Deep Vision Inc, the developer of an AI processor and comprehensive software development suite for edge computing applications, has received $35 million in a Series B financing round, led by Tiger Global. When combined with its existing revenue streams, the funding proceeds will help Deep Vision expand the capabilities of its AI processor and software tools and support its rapidly growing customer base.

Tiger Global is joined by Series A investors Exfinity Venture Partners, SiliconMotion, and Western Digital, which are also rejoining in the latest round of financing.

“We will now be able to significantly fortify our efforts to continue designing and building the world's most power- and price-efficient AI inference platform as well as flawless software development tools,” said Ravi Annavajjhala, Deep Vision’s chief executive officer.

Deep Vision’s patented AI processor, named ARA-1, delivers a combination of performance, power, and price for camera-based applications like smart retail, driver-monitoring systems, smart city, drones, and factory automation. Although best known for its ability to perform real-time video analytics, the company’s processor also provides natural language processing (NLP) capabilities for a growing market of voice-controlled applications. Deep vision complements its processing technology with an extremely comprehensive, flexible, and robust set of development tools. These allow its customers to easily convert their neural network models into highly optimized computation graphs ready to be deployed on the ARA-1 chip.

“The key to our success is rooted in the ingenuity, passion, dedication, and spirit of collaboration of our architecture and engineering teams in India,” said Sree Reddy, Deep Vision’s VP of Engineering. “Deep Vision’s leadership position in the Edge AI space is the result of cutting-edge research developed at Stanford coupled with flawless execution by the engineering team in India as well as the cross-border collaboration between the US and India teams.”

Scott Shleifer, Partner, Tiger Global said Deep Vision is positioned for a long runway ahead, with a unique AI processor that combines innovative software and silicon architecture for edge computing.

Other investors  Exfinity Venture Partners’ core funding theses is to back companies leveraging skill and scale in the fertile Indo-US tech corridor, particularly in the deep tech domain from early stages.

“Deep Vision is a testament to this, as their execution demonstrates India's semiconductor chip designers' potential in building cutting edge AI silicon chips,” said Chinnu Senthilkumar, general partner and chief technology officer, Exfinity Venture Partners.