San Diego: AI Edge chip company Kneron raises additional $49m funds

Kneron, a startup developing chips for AI inferencing, has raised $49 million from investors to scale up its hardware-developing efforts. Investors, including Foxconn HH-CTBC Partnership (Foxconn Co-GP Fund) and Alltek, made this additional investment, bringing the total Series B financing to $97m and overall funding to $190m. 

Albert Liu, founder and CEO of Kneron, said, "Powerful GPT models are mostly still running out of cloud data centers. This results in a slew of issues, including high latency, high data transfer costs, and inadequacies in user privacy and security protection. Kneron's solutions resolve these industry bottlenecks by creating hyper-efficient AI chips."

This AI startup is developing variants of its 'neural processing unit' (NPU) chip, a low-power CPU, for autonomous vehicles, Edge servers, and Internet of Things devices.

Liu also revealed to CNBC that the company intends to partner with one of its investors, Foxconn HH-CTBC Partnership, to "accelerate the deployment of advanced AI," as well as develop "an ultra-lightweight AI chip that operates" for generative pre-trained, or GPT, models from the cloud.