Funds will finance the sales ramp of GreenWaves’ first product, GAP8, and the development of the company’s next generation product
GRENOBLE, France — (BUSINESS WIRE) — February 19, 2019 — GreenWaves Technologies (GreenWaves), a fabless semiconductor start-up designing disruptive ultra-low-power AI embedded processors for battery-operated edge devices, announced today that it has raised 7 million euro in its Series A. The round was co-led by Huami, with the participation of Soitec, its seed round lead investor, and other investors.
“This support from a distinguished group of corporate investors demonstrates the GAP processor family’s unique value proposition within this emerging market,” said Loic Lietar, GreenWaves’ co-founder and CEO. “We have been one step ahead of the market in identifying and serving this segment that is now widely recognized by the industry.”
GAP8 has a unique combination of best-in-class attributes to serve battery-operated AI use cases:
- Leading energy efficiency for machine learning inference computing at power consumption levels compatible with years of battery-powered operation.
- Ultra-fast wake up, low stand-by power consumption and dynamically adjustable frequency and voltage to consume energy only when required.
- Fully programmable regular RISC-V / PULP parallel architecture to cope with the rapidly evolving state-of-the-art in machine learning algorithms.
GAP8 best serves IoT and consumer battery-operated applications including consumer and medical wearables, people and objects counting, machine health monitoring, home surveillance, voice control, face detection and recognition, consumer robotics, autonomous micro-drones, and smart toys.
GAP8 was launched in February 2018 and more than 300 development boards have been sold to date. GAP8 is enjoying strong commercial traction with multiple customer designs in progress.
GreenWaves is one of the very first RISC-V silicon vendors to successfully offer the industry a highly differentiated technical and market positioning to capture RISC-V’s increasingly relevant Instruction Set Architecture.
The funds will also be used to complete the development of GreenWaves’ second generation product which will enable another quantitative and qualitative leap in the capabilities offered by intelligent, battery-powered edge devices.
“We are very pleased to be participating in GreenWaves’ Series A financing round,” said Wang Huang, Huami’s CEO (NYSE: HMI). “GreenWaves’ GAP8 and strong product roadmap has set the bar for delivering energy efficiency for high performance signal processing and machine learning inference algorithms on edge devices, including wearables. We see a wide range of use cases for GAP8 processor that will transform IoT computing. This investment will also strengthen our portfolio in the RISC-V ecosystem.”
“Soitec is proud to continue its support of GreenWaves’ unique solutions for ultra-low power computing,” said Paul Boudre, Soitec’s CEO. “GreenWaves’ chips, perfectly suited for AI and edge computing, are innovating across a wide range of markets and applications. Our engagement in GreenWaves' development is part of Soitec's long term strategy to play a key role in providing solutions for IoT, AI and mobile markets.”
To learn more about GreenWaves Technologies and GAP8 please visit www.greenwaves-technologies.com. GreenWaves will be demonstrating GAP8 at Embedded World 2019 at the RISC-V Foundation booth, 3A-536, in Nürnberg, Germany, from Tuesday, February 26 until Thursday, February 28, 2019.
About GreenWaves Technologies
GreenWaves Technologies is a fabless semiconductor start-up designing disruptive ultra-low power embedded solutions for image, sound and vibration AI processing in sensing devices. GreenWaves was founded in late 2014 with the mission of revolutionizing the market for intelligent sensors and devices with ultra-low energy and cost-efficient solutions. GreenWaves’ GAP8 is the industry’s first ultra-low-power processor enabling battery-operated artificial intelligence (AI) in Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The company is headquartered just outside Grenoble, France. To learn more, visit www.greenwaves-technologies.com.
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