El Dorado Hills-based artificial intelligence hardware and software developer Blaize has raised a $71 million round of venture capital to grow and expand the company’s deployment of chips for edge computing for a variety of industries.
This round of investment was led by the venture arm of Franklin Templeton, a new investor, and state-owned Singapore investment company Temasek Holdings Ltd., an existing investor, Blaize said.
“AI is massive. It is coming to every part of our lives,” Blaize CEO Dinakar Munagala told the Business Journal.
In addition to its AI chip technology, a core value proposition of Blaize is its AI Studio, a software platform that allows customers to program its chips using an intuitive group of tools that don’t require a software engineer to write code to achieve results, Munagala said.
The platform makes complex commands “super simple,” he said.
Blaize has been developing the chip and software architecture for a decade. It is meant to be used to process data quickly at the end points of connectivity, whether that be a transportation system, car, camera or robot.
Blaize began delivering its chips to customers last year. The new money will be used to expand outreach to new customers in the automotive, smart retail, smart city and industrial markets.
Blaize has 320 employees worldwide, with about 65 of them in the U.S. It has 20 employees at its headquarters in the El Dorado Hills Town Center. The company will be hiring between 100 and 150 additional employees worldwide over the next 18 months to a year as it “democratizes AI,” said Harminder Sehmi, vice president of finance with Blaize.
Franklin Templeton is a subsidiary of San Mateo-based Franklin Holdings Inc. (NYSE: BEN). Its investment in Blaize is part of its alternative investment portfolio.
In addition to Franklin Templeton and Temasek, another investor in the new round is existing investor Denso Corp., a Japanese auto components maker.
“Blaize has demonstrated the capability to enable value creation for organizations tapping the power of AI for edge computing,” said J.P. Scandalios, a Franklin Templeton senior vice president and portfolio manager, in a news release. “We are excited to invest as Blaize leadership takes strides to realize their vision. Automotive, and numerous edge AI markets, such as retail and metro, hold tremendous potential for Blaize to expand on their early market position as the adoption of AI at the edge accelerates, creating a new wave of industrial systems.”
Since its launch in 2010, Blaize has raised more than $158 million from venture capital funds and strategic investors, including German auto giant Daimler AG and Japanese investment company Sparx Group Co. Ltd. Other investors include Canadian mobility and automotive technology company Magna International Inc. (NYSE: MGA) and the Samsung Catalyst Fund.
“Blaize ‘system on chip’ for automotive edge and central compute functions are accelerating electric vehicles and future architectural ambitions of automotive original equipment manufacturers,” said Tony Cannestra, director of corporate ventures with Denso.
Blaize first came out of stealth mode in September 2018 when it announced it had raised $65 million in a funding round.
