Out of the Shadows

After almost 10 years of working incognito, former National Aeronautics and Space Administration head Daniel Goldin is finally ready to formally present KnuEdge to the world.

KnuEdge is a “neural technology innovation company,” an outfit that builds hardware and software based on neural technology, with a main focus on human-machine interaction. While newly revealed publicly, it has been in stealth mode for a decade now, and has already raised $100 million in funding to build its neural chips.

The company has revealed its two primary products: KnuVerse, which is a voice authentication technology, and KnuPath, its state-of-the-art neural chip. It has also unveiled Knurld.io, a software development kit with a cloud-based voice recognition and authentication service.

Products

Foremost of these offerings is KnuPath. Its inspiration comes from the inner workings of the brain, much like several products of IBM. Specifically, the chip is built on the same biological principles that the brain uses to get a lot of computing work done with a small amount of power, something called “sparse matrix heterogeneous machine learning algorithms.”

Say that three times fast.

KnuPath has something called LambdaFabric computing. The chip, KnuEdge’s first model, has 256 cores. Each of the cores could be made to run a different algorithm and run them simultaneously, since the LambdaFabric makes it possible to instantly connect these cores to each other. The LambdaFabric is designed to connect up to 512,000 devices, which gives it an interaction delay of only 400 nanoseconds.

KnuVerse comes from military-grade voice recognition and authentication technology, and hopes to develop the potential of voice interfaces in next-generation computing. It primarily focuses on the biometrics side, the use of the human voice to authenticate computers, mobile/web apps and IoT (Internet-of-Things) devices. Its technology eliminates noise, allowing for use even in extremely loud environments.

Part of the development of voice technologies is Knurld.io, which allows businesses and other parties to tap into the technology of KnuVerse. It delivers speaker authentication interfaces for developers and businesses, so that the voice recognition and authentication service can be integrated into apps and other UI’s.

And to think—the idea for the company and its cutting edge technology arose over a perceived need to supply faster and more efficient computing, able to crunch tens of millions of lines of computer code, for a potential Mars mission.

“It all started over a mission to Mars,” says Goldin, with immense and justifiable pride in the new endeavor.