New investors include the Japanese NEC Corporation, the ABB Technology Ventures Fund and the Titanium Ventures Fund. These investors join existing investors in the company, led by Zohar Zisapel, who also serves as the company’s chairman, the OurCrowd Foundation, the Mobility Generating Fund, the Glory Ventures Chinese Fund, as well as the former CEO of Delek Motors, Gil Agmon, Next Gear and the Drive Foundation.
The HiLo chip is designed for deep learning (Edge) learning tasks such as autonomous cars, smart cameras, smartphones, skimmers, and virtual reality platforms And a layered reality (VR and AR). Compared to processors designed for data centers (data centers), chips designed for end devices must not only excel at high speed, but especially with very high energy utilization, tiny dimensions and low cost.
Inside the HiLo chip, operations are performed that are usually distributed across several different components of the printed circuit board (the card on which the chips are installed). Instead of the chip turning to memory through the card’s communication components – the actions of control, memory retrieval, and processing – all take place within the chip itself. This is how bottlenecks are avoided, a feature that contributes to accelerating chip performance.
The chipset field of artificial intelligence has been one of the most growing in recent years, and is the reason for the meteoric surge of the Anvidia company, which has found itself turning from a graphics chip company to the number one company in the field. The last big deal in the field was in December last year, when Intel bought the $ 1 billion Israeli startup “Banana” for $ 2 billion, which is also a chipset for artificial intelligence.
This deal fitted Intel like a glove. Compared to HiLo chips for end devices, the Bana, Gaudi and Goya chips are designed for data centers – Intel’s main business alongside personal computers. One could say that the Banana deal was Intel’s second giant deal in Israel in the field of artificial intelligence, because Mobilai, which was acquired by Intel for $ 15 billion, is actually a developer of a dedicated artificial intelligence chip.
In a conversation with Globes, CEO of Hilo Or Dan rejects the claim that Hilo is on the shelf awaiting acquisition by Intel: “If we wanted to sell the company fast, we wouldn’t worry about complying with the automotive industry’s regulations, which is a dubious pleasure. The raising of capital is intended to support this goal. According to Danon, “Hilo is expanding to support large numbers of customers and opening representative offices near those clients in Asia, Europe and America, with another 40 employees in product development, business development and sales roles. However, Danon does not rule out the sale option -” We Are being mass-produced. What will happen on the way? God is great”.
Danon said the HiLo chip swatches have already received “over ten customers.” The type of clients he addresses, and his potential uses demonstrated by Danon through two of the investors. “One of the areas we thought our chip would do well is video analytics (video image recognition) and the Japanese NEC corporation is one of the world’s leading entry-level, biometrics and smart cities entities.”
The second example is the Swiss-Swedish industrial corporation ABB, which invested in Hilo through its investment arm: “In industry, deep learning is used for control of production lines, with all kinds of robotic arms and industrial devices, the ability to do real-time and on-site processing, very relevant to them. It’s an exception that such companies invest in a chip company, but they see it as a critical component of being able to build successful devices in the industrial field. When an industrial machine works quickly, there’s no unnecessary time to send the information to the cloud and wait for it to return. ”
NEC Corporation Development Center Director Zvi Lev said of the investment deal: “We have been working with the product in several scenarios for over a year, and in many situations its performance is significantly superior to the other alternatives we have explored. The field of artificial intelligence dedicated components in the universe and falling in price – the requirements Artificial intelligence’s computation continues to rise sharply all the time, so anyone who allows the most advanced models at reasonable cost and power to run will win. “
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