BV Family丨SynSense has completed nearly 200 million yuan in Pre-B round of financing

On September 17, SynSense, a brain-like chip company, announced that it has completed a pre-B round of financing of nearly 200 million yuan. It was jointly led by Qigang Investment and Zhangjiang Technology Investment, followed by China Power Haikang, China Merchants Qihang, Tycoyuan Electronics, Ventech China and other industry investors, with its old shareholders Heli Capital and Yachang Investment add.

This round of financing is mainly used to accelerate the research and development of brain-like chip products and promote the industrialization of brain-like technology in the field of artificial intelligence edge computing. explained by Qiao Ning, the founder and CEO of SynSense.

According to the data, SynSense is a world-leading brain-inspired smart chip design and research and development company. Based on more than 20 years of brain-like technology research results of the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, the company was established in Zurich, Switzerland in February 2017, and moved its headquarters to China in April 2020. This is also the only brain-inspired chip company incubated and held overseas by the University of Zurich, a world-renowned university. SynSense provides the world's leading ultra-low power consumption and ultra-low latency brain-like technology solutions, which have won industry innovation awards such as CES many times, and can be widely used in trillion edge computing intelligent application scenarios.

Technology giants team up

To establish a brain-like chip startup company

Dr. Qiao Ning, founder and CEO of SynSense, graduated from the Institute of Semiconductors of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, joined the Institute of Neuroinformatics (INI) of the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich in 2012, and led the research team as a senior researcher (Oberassistant) to engaged in cutting-edge brain-like chip research and development. He has led and participated in nearly 10 EU brain-like projects, designed and developed a number of world-leading brain-like chip platforms, and published dozens of brain-like articles in top international conferences and journals.

Professor Giacomo Indiveri, the co-founder of SynSense, studied under Professor Carver Mead, the legendary California Institute of Technology, the inventor of neuromorphic engineering, and the father of integrated circuits. For more than 20 years, Professor Giacomo has been deeply involved in the research of brain-inspired technology. He is extremely influential in the field of brain-inspired technology and is regarded as a great figure in the brain-inspired world. Currently, Professor Giacomo is a tenured professor at the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, and the director of the Zurich Institute of Neuroinformatics INI. Also, he also works at SynSense as the chief scientist.

SynSense has a world-class team to do R&D and industrializationin brain-like technology. Up to now, the company has had top design R&D centers and joint laboratories in Zurich, Shanghai, Nanjing, Chengdu, Suzhou and other places. It has gathered nearly 100 top technical R&D personnel from more than a dozen countries and regions, covering brain-like chip algorithms, Chip architecture, chip design, chip application development and many other dimensions. Nearly 80% of the company's staff belong to the R&D team, and nearly 50% of which have a doctorate degree or above from top international universities and R&D experience. The entire team has authored more than 600 top journals and conferences such as Nature and Science, with more than 17,000 citations; Furthermore, the company's management has worked in internationally renowned companies such as Intel, HiSilicon, IDT, and Lenovo with more than 10 years of industry R&D and management experience.

Based on all-round advantages such as brain-like algorithms, chip technology, and market application, SynSense has become one of the internationally recognized leaders in brain-like technology. After the company landed in China in 2020, it quickly grasped industry attention and won many domestic and foreign awards. From 2020 to 2021, it was rated as one of the "100 most noteworthy startups in the world" by EE Times for two consecutive years as the only brain-like chip company on the list.

In the "2021 Brain-inspired Market and Technology Analysis Report" released by Yole, SynSense Technology has also received high attention known as "the only brain-inspired smart chip company that spans perception and computing."

In July of this year, SynSense Technology released Speck, a disruptive edge vision intelligence solution, which is the world's first fully bionic, dynamic visual intelligent SoC based on brain-like perception and brain-like computing. Speck's single chip integrates dynamic visual perception DVS module and SynSense's original DYNAP-CNN dynamic visual computing core, which is the world's first fully event-driven, sub-milliwatt and ultra-low power consumption, millisecond ultra-low latency , no privacy one, focusing on a complete intelligent vision solution on the end. Once the design was released, it received widespread attention from the industry. Not only did the product win the SAIL, the World Artificial Intelligence Conference WAIC Outstanding Artificial Intelligence Leader Award, the company also successfully developed in-depth cooperation with world-renowned mobile phone module manufacturers to launch lightweight intelligent vision modules. At present, the company has reached in-depth cooperation with China Power Haikang and other companies in the fields of smart security, smart lamps, and smart health care. It is expected that the small-scale mass production of Speck can be achieved by the end of 2021.

Compared with other research-driven institutions, SynSense has a more pragmatic style. On the basis of being market-oriented, this company has embarked on another path: using market demand as the engine, driving algorithm optimization, and finally implementing brain-like technology to the chip design and application layer. Under this implementation path, the integration of SynSense's brain-inspired chips will be increased by dozens of times compared to general brain-inspired chip platforms such as IBM's TrueNorth, Intel's Loihi, and Tsinghua University's Tiankine core. With the great reduction of power consumption, the cost of the chip will also be reduced to a few tenths or one percent, for example, droping from 100 US dollars to 1 US dollar. This is also one of the main reasons why SynSense is highly recognized and endorsed by various well-known investors and industry investors.