Latent AI Raises $19 Million Series A To Enable Next Generation AI Factories

New Investors and Fortune 500 Partners will Accelerate Latent AI’s Ability to Enable AI-Powered Solutions at the Edge for Multiple Industries

Latent AI has announced  the closing of a $19 million Series A investment round co-led by Blackhorn Ventures and Future Ventures. Other notable investors in this round include Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin, 40 North Ventures, Pegasus Tech Ventures and Autotech Ventures. This funding will support the company’s mission to empower developers to optimize AI models for the edge continuum. Latent AI is enabling next generation AI factories to deploy AI applications at scale, and in a fast, repeatable and robust manner.

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“We founded Latent AI to simplify how AI is developed for edge devices,” said Jags Kandasamy, CEO and co-founder of Latent AI. “This round of investments will allow us to scale a world class team to build industry defining products. Our solutions are being used in more places than ever before from manufacturing automation, predictive maintenance, process control, consumer electronics, and defense and aerospace applications. We are starting to unlock use cases that were thought impossible, and we are just getting started.”

The company’s flagship MLOps product, Latent AI Efficient Inference Platform (LEIP), allows compression and optimization of neural nets running on any hardware target in the edge continuum. With its Adaptive AI℠ technology, LEIP compresses conventional AI models below 8-bit integer precision without a noticeable accuracy change, with results of offering more than 10x memory size savings and 3x inference speed improvements with software-only optimizations. It’s guided training method, presented at the 2021 TinyML Research Symposium, demonstrated shrinking a person-detection model for visual wakeup applications to 81kB.

LEIP provides a homogeneous development platform for an ecosystem of heterogeneous hardware, including microcontrollers, CPUs, GPUs, and other hardware accelerators. Results were featured in the premier MLPerf Tiny Inference benchmarks, as the only industry participant offering a software-only solution. The LEIP SDK shortens the production cycles with a repeatable development process, regardless of framework, OS, architecture, or hardware.

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“Jags, and the team at Latent AI have built a hardware-agnostic platform that enables AI developers to go from concept to market in record time, and in doing so drastically increases the efficiency of edge operations,” said Philip O’Connor, Managing Partner and Co-Founder at Blackhorn Ventures. “We are thrilled for the opportunity to partner with them on their journey.” Philip O’Connor will be joining the Latent AI board of directors.

In addition, Latent AI will be working separately with Booz Allen Hamilton and Lockheed Martin as strategic investment partners to help enable clients in the defense industry to accelerate AI adoption for mission-critical requirements.

From Chris Moran, Vice President, Corporate Development and Executive Director of Lockheed Martin Ventures at Lockheed Martin: “AI is a key component of the leading-edge technology powering next-generation national security solutions,” said Chris Moran. We believe our investment in Latent AI will allow us to have deeper engagement with developers and users of autonomous technologies, and will enable us to drive new AI solutions to the edge where needed in national security and defense.”

From Steve Escaravage, Senior Vice President at Booz Allen: “The National Defense Strategy calls for a more innovative, resilient military to maintain the U.S. competitive advantage, and the ability to collect, analyze and quickly act on data at the tactical edge is at the core of the mission,” said Steve Escaravage, senior vice president at Booz Allen. “Our strategic investment in Latent AI will help Booz Allen bring advanced dual-use technology to the public sector, accelerating AI adoption and return on investment for our clients.”

In the commercial sector, Latent AI is working with a few new startups to build AI-powered solutions. In both use cases, Latent AI is accelerating development cycles to deploy their specific AI models on the edge. Mama Gaia, a Denver-based company creates self-service smart fridges aimed at bringing quality food choices that are healthy and locally-sourced. Jujotech, a Boulder-based company develops smart wearable solutions for industrial mobile applications.

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