Unicorn Hailo Closes $120 Million Funding Round, Debuts Powerful Hailo-10 AI Accelerator Bringing GenAI To Edge Devices
Jerusalem, Israel
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April 16, 2024 08:45 AM Eastern Daylight Time
By Matthew Kalman
Hailo, the pioneering chipmaker of edge artificial intelligence (AI) processors, announced the successful extension of its series C fundraising round with an additional investment of $120 million, bringing its valuation to more than $1 billion, Bloomberg reported.
The successful close is “the latest sign of investor enthusiasm for startups that can help address a global chip shortage and fuel the development of generative AI,” Bloomberg reported.
The company also announced the introduction of its innovative Hailo-10 high-performance generative AI (GenAI) accelerators that usher in an era where users can own and run GenAI applications locally – including on many edge devices – without registering to cloud-based GenAI services.
“Hailo’s chips execute AI tasks with lower memory usage and power consumption than a typical processor, making them a strong candidate for compact, offline and battery-powered devices such as cars, smart cameras and robotics,” said TechCrunch.
While the funding round has officially closed, investors can still participate in this raise for a limited period via an exclusive allocation available through OurCrowd, the online investment platform.
“OurCrowd first invested in Hailo when it was valued at about $30 million. Now it’s a unicorn,” said Jon Medved, OurCrowd’s Founder and CEO. “We are excited and delighted to be able to offer investors the opportunity to participate in the development of impressive startups like this.”
The current round brings Hailo’s total funding to more than $340 million.
“The closing of our new funding round enables us to leverage all the exciting opportunities in our pipeline, while setting the stage for our long-term future growth,” said Orr Danon Hailo’s CEO and Co-Founder. “Together with the introduction of our Hailo-10 GenAI accelerator, it strategically positions us to bring classic and generative AI to edge devices in ways that will significantly expand the reach and impact of this remarkable new technology.”
“We designed Hailo-10 to seamlessly integrate GenAI capabilities into users’ daily lives, freeing users from cloud network constraints. This empowers them to utilize chatbots, copilots, and other emerging content generation tools with unparalleled flexibility and immediacy, enhancing productivity and enriching lives,” Danon said.
GenAI At The Edge
The new Hailo-10 GenAI accelerator enables a whole spectrum of applications that maintain Hailo’s leadership in both performance-to-cost ratio and performance-to-power consumption ratio. Hailo-10 leverages the same comprehensive software suite used across the Hailo-8 AI accelerators and the Hailo-15 AI vision processors, enabling seamless integration of AI capabilities across multiple edge devices and platforms.
Enabling GenAI at the edge ensures continuous access to GenAI services, regardless of network connectivity; obviates network latency concerns, which can otherwise impact GenAI performance; promotes privacy by keeping personal information anonymized and enhances sustainability by reducing reliance on the substantial processing power of cloud data centers.
By unlocking the power of GenAI on edge devices, such as personal computers, smart vehicles and commercial robots, Hailo-10 allows users to completely own their GenAI experiences, making them an integral part of their daily routine. Hailo accomplishes this immersive GenAI experience through a Hailo-10 architecture that supports maximum GenAI performance with minimum required power.
“As GenAI on the edge becomes immersive, the focus turns to handling large LLMs in the smallest possible power envelope — essentially less than five watts,” Danon said.
Since its founding in Israel in 2017, Hailo has become a leading global supplier of intelligent AI chips that serves more than 300 customers around the world. The company has offices in the United States, Europe, Japan, South Korea, China and Taiwan.
“Whether users employ GenAI to automate real-time translation or summarization services, generate software code, or images and videos from text prompts, Hailo-10 lets them do it directly on their PCs or other edge systems, without straining the CPU or draining the battery,” Danon said.
Top Class Performance
Hailo’s specialized AI processors enable data center-class performance on edge devices. Hailo’s processors are the product of a rethinking of traditional computer architecture, enabling smart devices to perform sophisticated deep learning tasks such as object detection and segmentation in real-time, with minimal power consumption, size and cost. The processors are designed to fit into a multitude of smart machines and devices, impacting a variety of sectors including compute, automotive, security, industry 4.0, and retail.
Early applications of Hailo-10 GenAI accelerators will be targeting PCs and automotive infotainment systems, empowering current and future CPUs that cannot by themselves power the chatbots, copilots, personal assistants and speech-operated operating systems that have become standard today. Hailo will begin shipping samples of the Hailo-10 GenAI accelerator in Q2 of 2024.
Among popular GenAI platforms, Hailo-10 can run Llama2-7B with up to 10 tokens per second (TPS) at under 5W of power. In processing Stable Diffusion 2.1, a popular model that produces images from text prompts, Hailo-10 is rated at under 5 seconds per image in the same ultra-low power envelope.
Hailo-10 is capable of up to 40 TOPS (tera operations per second), a new performance standard for edge AI accelerators. Hailo-10 is faster and more energy efficient than integrated neural processing unit (NPU) solutions and delivers at least 2X more performance at half the power of Intel’s Core Ultra NPU, according to recently published benchmarks.
Hailo will be present at the Embedded World exhibition in Nuremberg, April 9-11, Booth 126, Hall 1, and at the ISC West exhibition in Las Vegas, April 10-12, Booth #31065.
For more information about investing in Hailo via the OurCrowd platform, click HERE.
Featured photo courtesy of OurCrowd.
OurCrowd was started in 2013, driven by the idea that the business of building startups grows bigger and better when the global ‘crowd’ gains access to VC-level investment opportunities.Today, OurCrowd is a global venture and alternative investing platform that empowers institutions and individuals to invest and engage in emerging companies. OurCrowd vets and selects companies, invests its capital, and provides its global network with unparalleled access to co-invest and contribute connections, talent and deal flow. OurCrowd builds value for its portfolio companies throughout their lifecycles, providing mentorship, recruiting industry advisors, navigating follow-on rounds and creating growth opportunities through its network of multinational partnerships.
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