Company: Recogni Inc.
Industry: Automated Vehicle Industry
Year of incorporation: 2017
Headquarter: San Jose
Funding: Raised $25 Mn in series A financing round in 2019
Co-Founders: RK Anand, Ashwini Choudhary, Eugene Feinberg, Valerie Chan, and Gilles Backhus
Although fully autonomous vehicles are still treading in the realm of human imagination, the line between reality and imagination is blurring and is blurring quite rapidly. Much of this credit certainly goes to prominent companies like Tesla, Uber, and Google but some startups have played an equally important role in giving a helping hand in this quest.
San Jose headquartered Recogni INC, however, has more than offered a helping hand. Its technology is proving to be a huge boost and a decisive push that might eventually help in making autonomous vehicles a full-fledged reality. To clear the air, Recogni INC is into designing a vision-oriented artificial intelligence system that enables autonomous vehicles to see farther & clearer and eventually help autonomous vehicles to achieve true autonomy.
Recogni INC was formed with the philosophy that without resolving the visual perception problem achieving ‘complete autonomy’ for AV vehicles will always remain an elusive dream. In simple words, a driverless car must correctly analyze the surrounding and recognize objects even at a further distance with sheer precision. This means it has to make a decision in less than 50 milliseconds on urban city roads and 30 milliseconds on highway driving.
Such precise decisions at a breathtaking speed are only possible with the help of an ostensibly powerful chip. Recogni had set on the journey of designing a potent chip long before its peers and competitors in the industry. Driven by raw passion and ceaseless perseverance, this young startup eventually succeeded in designing such a revolutionary chip.
According to Recogni, its chip is super-efficient with 100 Tops per watt and carries 1000 TOPS of processing power. This conventionally is more than sufficient to meet the processing required to resolve the visual perception problem. And by the way, this is achieved without compromising battery performance.
As for the impact that this chip can have on the industry then it can not only help Tesla in achieving full autonomy but also help other companies to close the gap with Elon Musk’s company.
USP of Recogni Real-Time Recognition Technology
- The only multi-ocular camera system that obtains passive stereoscopic depth at the pixel level.
- Achieves greater processing efficiency & speed by storing weights (parameters) of the object library on-chip.
Recogni’s technology has already made its powerful impact on the industry, with the company recently raising whopping $25 Mn from investors. But what was more heartening to see that even big names from the auto industry, like Toyota and BMW, also participated in this funding round. This indicates the inherent strength and mindboggling potential that Recogni’s technology possesses.
Conclusion
The realtime object recognition holds the key for making the driverless cars a full-fledged reality. Recogni’s with it low power AI computing and high performance in object recognition seems to be the solution that will blur the line between imagination and reality. Recogni’s technology still has a long way to go to prove its commercial success. It is surely making all the right noises. It is certainly for nothing that some of the powerhouses from the auto industry have decided to repose their faith in the technology of this young startup.