Recogni raises $48. 9 million in Series B Round to advance AI-powered vision recognition for autonomous vehicles

It’s been a while since we checked in with Recogni, an artificial intelligence startup that is building low-power AI processing for autonomous vehicles. In July 2019, Recogni exited stealth mode with $25 million in Series A funding to deliver ab inferencing system that enables state-of-the-art sensor fusion of visual and depth sensor data while continuing to grow its top-tier engineering team.

Since July 2019, when we last featured the company, Recogni has completed successful proof-of-concept demonstrations with customers that validate Recogni’s approach. The Series B funding announced today will be dedicated to bringing Recogni’s technology to market and to expanding the Recogni marketing, sales, and engineering teams.

Today, Recogni announced it has raised a $48.9 million Series B funding round. The round was led by WRVI Capital, a prominent global technology investor. The proceeds will help Recogni bring its perception platform to market and expand its engineering and go-to-market teams.

In addition to WRVI Capital, new investors Mayfield Fund, Continental, and Robert Bosch Venture Capital joined existing investors GreatPoint Ventures, Toyota AI Ventures, BMW i Ventures, Fluxunit – OSRAM Ventures, and DNS Capital in the current financing round.

Founded in 2017 by Ashwini Choudhary, Eugene Feinberg, Gilles Backhus, R K Anand, and Valerie Chan, Recogni is the designer of a vision-oriented artificial intelligence platform for an autonomous vehicle. The startup has positioned itself to revolutionize perception processing for Level 2+ autonomous vehicles. Using a Vision Cognition Processor, Recogni will solve the endpoint inferencing problem with autonomous vehicles efficiently and change the trajectory of full level 3, 4, and 5 autonomy. The company’s founders possess deep industry experience in system design, AI, vision, and custom silicon design.

Many chipmakers and technology companies are looking at new opportunities created by the convergence of electrification and automated/autonomous driving. The advent of electric vehicles in concert with autonomous vehicle adoption will yield the promise of a technology-first automobile that will affect society in a fundamental manner. An important enabler of this future is Recogni’s ability to deliver accurate, real-time object recognition in all weather and lighting conditions.

Recogni’s VCM will be able to deliver groundbreaking perception performance at ultra-low power consumption, enabling high-resolution, high-frame-rate processing from multiple cameras concurrently in real-time. As a result, vision perception systems can now scale from supporting safety features to full vehicle autonomy — all without compromising the driving range of electric vehicles.

Recogni shows that the vehicle OEM and Tier 1 suppliers are looking for innovative technology solutions to accelerate their autonomous driving programs. That’s why I thought Recogni’s story would be interesting to you. I’m happy to provide additional information about the announcement and to set up an interview with Recogni CEO and co-founder R K Anand. Contact me by phone or email any time.

“As Silicon Valley-based deep technology investors, we understand the impact that fundamental breakthroughs in silicon architecture, embedded software, AI algorithms, and power efficiency can have on autonomous vehicle development,” said Sriram Viswanathan, Founding Managing Partner of WRVI Capital. “We were attracted to Recogni’s team, the innovations across multiple domains, and the potential to massively accelerate the journey to fully autonomous transportation. We are convinced their innovations have the potential to make them the leader in this market segment.”

“This investment is a strong endorsement of Recogni’s vision from venture and industry leaders. We are moving along our journey of solving the challenge of perception processing and power efficiency, by building the world’s highest-performing AI inference system at the lowest energy consumption,” said R K Anand, Recogni’s Chief Executive Officer.

“As a people-first investor, it always begins with the team,” said Navin Chaddha, Managing Director, Mayfield. “I first met R K seven years ago. I have always been impressed by him and we have kept in touch since then. When you combine that with our belief in the renaissance of silicon, it was obvious that Recogni’s approach to AI edge inference will help develop new generations of safe, power-efficient, self-driving vehicles. We look forward to partnering with them as they help put silicon back into Silicon Valley.”