SAN FRANCISCO — The venture capital arms of six prominent tech companies — including Microsoft, Amazon and Intel — invested Syntiant, an AI chip startup focusing initially on voice recognition.

The $25 million Series B funding round — which led by M12 (formerly known as Microsoft Ventures) — brings to just over $30 million the amount raised so far by Syntiant, an Irvine, Calif.-based chip startup founded last year.

Syntiant is currently sampling its first product, a microwatt level chip that the company refers to as a neural decision processor (NPD). Syntiant says it delivers about 50 times improvement in efficiency versus traditional digital stored-program architectures.

Joining M12 in participating in the Series B round were the Amazon Alexa Fund, Applied Ventures, Intel Capital, Motorola Solutions Venture Capital and Robert Bosch Venture Capital.

“We are super excited to be working with some of the world's greatest companies,” said Kurt Busch, Syntiant's CEO, in an interview with EE Times. Busch said Syntiant views the investors as great partners that are highly motivated to accelerate the advancement of machine learning.

Busch said Syntiant would use the new funding to commercialize its initial product and begin work on its second-generation chip, which will broaden the application of Syntiant's technology to include video. That chip, a a 20 tera-operations/watt NPD, is scheduled to begin sampling in the first half of next year.

Recommended

AI Startup Seeks its Voice

Busch told EE Times in June that the company aims to make it extremely easy to add voice control to any device, including battery-operated systems.

The popularity of virtual electronic assistants like Amazon's Echo and Google Home has ushered in a new era of voice computing interfaces that many people believe will come to include virtually every consumer device with electronics. Amazon, Google and Baidu — among others — have embarked on quest to spread their AI-powered voice services.

Syntiant's technology is based on a processor-in-memory architecture defined by its the company's CTO, Jeremy Holleman, a researcher at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. Holleman published academic work in the area as far back as 2014 at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference.

Syntiant's architecture is one of a handful in the emerging AI landscape that are considered promising for executing at very low power the massively parallel multiply-accumulate operations involved in deep learning.

Syntiant said it demonstrated a prototype NDP earlier this month at Infineon's OktoberTech 2018. The prototype is capable of simultaneously supporting dozens of application-defined audio and keyword classifications, enabling developers to create custom, always-on speech user interfaces, according to the company.

In conjunction with the funding infusion, Syntiant said it would expand its board to five members, adding M12 Managing Director Samir Kumar as well as SpaceX CFO Bret Johnsen.

Partnered Content: Learn how to improve cost, efficiency and savings with custom-spooled component reels