Kneron: Former qualcomm-backed company gets funding from Foxconn

 A startup based out of San Diego and Taipei is quietly nailing fundings and deals from a number of the most important names in electronics. Kneron, which focuses on energy-efficient processors for edge AI , just raised a strategic funding round from Taiwan’s manufacturing giant Foxconn and microcircuit producer Winbond.

The deal came a year after Kneron closed a $40 million round led by Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-Shing’s Horizons Ventures. Amongst its other prominent investors are Alibaba Entrepreneurship Fund, Sequoia Capital, Qualcomm and SparkLabs Taipei.

Kneron declined to disclose the dollar amount of the investment from Foxconn and Winbond thanks to investor requests but said it had been an “eight figures” deal, founder and CEO Albert Liu told TechCrunch in an interview.

About Kneron

Founded in 2015, Kneron’s latest product may be a neural processing unit which will enable sophisticated AI applications without counting on the cloud. The startup is directly taking over the chips of Intel and Google, which it claims are more energy-consuming than its offering. The startup recently got a talent boost after hiring Davis Chen, Qualcomm’s former Taipei head of engineering.

Among Kneron’s customers are Chinese air con giant Gree and German’s autonomous driving software provider Teraki, and therefore the new deal is popping the world’s largest electronics manufacturer into a client. As a part of the strategic agreement, Kneron will work with Foxconn on the latter’s smart manufacturing and newly introduced open platform for electric vehicles, while its work with Winbond will specialise in microcontroller unit (MCU)-based AI and memory computing.

“Low-power AI chips are pretty easy to place into sensors. We all know that in some operation lines, sensors are quite small, so it’s tough to use an enormous GPU [graphics processing unit] or CPU [central processing unit], especially when power consumption may be a big concern,” said Liu, who held R&D positions at Qualcomm and Samsung before founding Kneron.

Unlike a number of its competitors, Kneron designs chips for a good range of use cases, from manufacturing, smart home, smartphones, robotics, surveillance, payments, to autonomous driving. It doesn’t just make chips but also the AI software embedded within the chips, a technique that Liu said differentiates his company from China’s AI darlings like SenseTime and Megvii, which enable AI service through the cloud.

Kneron has also been on a less aggressive funding pace than these companies, which fuel their rapid expansion through outsize financing rounds. Six-year-old SenseTime has raised about $2.6 billion so far , while nine-year-old Megvii has banked about $1.4 billion. Kneron, as compared , has raised just over $70 million from a Series A round.

Like the Chinese AI upstarts, Kneron is weighing an initial public offering. the corporate is predicted to form a profit in 2023, Liu said, and “that will probably be an honest time for us to travel IPO.”