Kneron Closes B Round at $48 Million

SAN DIEGO, Oct. 5, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Leading full-stack edge AI company Kneron today announces new series B funding of $48 million led by Horizons Ventures. New investors joining the round include LITEON, a world-leading provider of opto-electronics and power solutions; ADATA, a leading memory compute provider; as well as the family office of a major Taiwanese financial institution which, as a business group, operates subsidiaries that range from real estate development to telecommunications. Through the current round, Kneron's previous series A2 investor Foxconn also increased their investment amount.

Albert Liu, founder and CEO of Kneron, says: "We are excited to work our new strategic investors in the advancement of core smart city infrastructures. Edge AI is key to enabling a whole array of devices, from edge servers to smart cameras, which will truly accelerate a proliferation of AI applications that require cross-vertical efforts. With new funding, we are prepared to tape out a next generation of innovative chips."

Over the past year, Kneron saw significant new customer wins spanning multiple verticals including smart vehicles, smart homes and smart cities.

With Hanwha, the global leader in IP cameras, Kneron partnered up to accelerate smart city and smart building management. Kneron's KL720 enables the Hanwha Techwin X series AI cameras for functions such as virtual fences and human detection.

As of March, Kneron also presented its solutions at the Foxconn-led Mobility in Harmony (MIH) Consortium for electric vehicles. Kneron displayed its OT8600+KL520 developer board for vehicle camera sensors to deploy people, vehicle and object detection.

Other new partners teaming up with Kneron to push out products in vehicle, security and broader AIoT use cases include:

• Spark, Sens-cam: AI sens-cam for mask detection.
• SMAX, VS8 for Chunghwa Telecom: A box (edge server) with two KL720 for smart traffic crossroads regulation.
• TDV, iEdge4: Industrial grade raspberry pi box for parking lot license plate management system.
• Zhongxin Bus: Blind spot detection.

Across previous years, Kneron has also established collaborations with customers including the likes of Garmin, Dessmann, Gree, OFILM, AAEON, Advantech, and Quanta.

Kneron's newly raised funds brings the company's total funding to date to over $140 million, following initial Series A funding from financial investors including the likes of Qualcomm, Alibaba, Circle Investment, Sequoia as well as strategic investors such as Foxconn and Delta Electronics.

Founded in 2015 and based in San Diego, Kneron develops full-stack hardware and software products for AI applications. Kneron's lightweight reconfigurable solutions resolves three major problems faced by edge devices running AI—latency, security, and cost––thereby enabling AI everywhere. To date, Kneron has raised over $140 million, backed by Horizons Ventures, Alibaba, Qualcomm, Sequoia, Foxconn, Circle Investment, and more. For further information about Kneron, please visit: http://www.kneron.com/about.

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