Artificial intelligence startup Recogni Inc. announced it raised a mega funding round after expanding its reach into generative artificial intelligence.
The San Jose startup historically has developed hardware to help autonomous vehicles understand object detection, but the company has expanded its operations to develop chips for the gen-AI landscape.
Now the company, founded in 2017, is banking on a $102 million Series C funding round co-led by Celesta Capital and GreatPoint Ventures to hone in on that expansion.
"Like any other transformative technology, we are going through a big change with Generative AI both in our development strategies as well as considering societal impacts," said Marc Bolitho, the startup's CEO. "We are experiencing first-hand AI model growth and the impact to data centers and energy generation. This is likely to continue but the baseline approach should be the same: Be environmentally conscious and scale in a way that doesn't force an overhaul change in existing infrastructure which is neither environmentally sound nor cost effective. Artificial intelligence is going from artificial to feeling real with its generative nature."
The round’s funds will go toward manufacturing and marketing its chips. In 2022, the company announced the launch of a chip, dubbed Scorpio, which focuses on predictions made through new data, referred to as inference.
Chips on the market today focus on supporting the training of large language models and running AI systems, making Scorpio different from others.
Although the chips have a focus on generative AI, its development is something Bolitho said is necessary and will soon be part of autonomous systems. According to Bolitho, the chip operates faster and requires less energy than those of competitors.
Recogni’s expansion comes at a time when venture funding in the autonomous vehicle space has slowed. In 2023, startups in the AI space only raised $4.5 billion worldwide — a 64% decrease from two years prior, according to data from Crunchbase.
“The ability to process rapidly changing multimodal models and not be tailored to just one set of models is of paramount importance," he said. "General purpose solutions work well in this area; however they come with significant cost and power consumption. ... What is key in this effort is push-button conversion of trained AI models to the Recogni platform without extensive on customer premise software effort and development tools that provide a preview of hardware resources utilized and associated power consumption.”
The Series C more than doubles the company's funding and saw participation from Mayfield, DNS Capital, BMW i Ventures, SW Mobility Fund, Pledge Ventures and Tasaru Mobility Investments, which is a subsidiary of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.
To date, the company has raised $175.9 million in funding and was last valued by investors at $431.9 million, according to PitchBook Data. Recogni’s backers include SAIC Capital, Celesta Capital, Toyota Ventures, GreatPoint Ventures and others.
