Innatera, spun out of the Delft University of Technology in 2018, aims to fill a market gap for AI-powered devices requiring human-machine interaction. The company's processors can be used as a dedicated sensor-handling engine, allowing functions such as conditioning, filtering, and classification to be offloaded from a central processor or sent to the cloud. The company plans a Series B funding round within the next year. The Series A extension was led by Innavest and Invest-NL N.V., with participation from existing investors including the European Commission’s EIC Fund, MIG Capital LLC, Matterwave Ventures Management GmbH, and Delft Enterprises B.V.
Key takeaways:
- Innatera Nanosystems B.V. has raised $21 million in Series A funding for its ultra-low-power AI chips, including a $16 million investment announced in March and an additional $5 million from new investors.
- The company's Spiking Neural Processor T1 is an energy-efficient AI chip for sensor-edge applications, which consumes 500 times less energy and is 100 times faster than conventional microprocessors.
- The processors can be used in applications like security cameras and listening devices, and are particularly useful when there is event data inside the data stream or something temporal such as radar, low-resolution images, cameras and sensors.
- Innatera plans to use the funding to get its first product into large-scale production in 2025 and expand marketing and sales. A Series B funding round is planned within the next year.