Blaize on fire with edge AI, raises $71M Series D
Blaize last week announced the close of a $71m Series D round of funding. Franklin Templeton, a new investor, and Temasek, an existing investor, led the round, along with participation from DENSO and other new and existing investors.
Blaize describes itself as the AI computing innovator revolutionizing edge and automotive computing solutions.
“Blaize has demonstrated the capability to enable value creation for organizations tapping the power of AI for edge computing,” notes JP Scandalios, senior vice president and portfolio manager, Franklin Templeton. “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.”
“We are pleased to welcome Franklin Templeton as the co-lead of the Blaize Series D,” adds Kheng Nam Lee, Deputy Chairman, Vertex Venture Holdings. “The prospects are substantial. Today Blaize is delivering to customers a distinct fusion of AI hardware and AI Studio end-to-end software platform that leads the industry in productization of high-value knowledge-driven edge computing solutions.”
The funding will support acceleration of the product roadmap to meet growing demand for higher performance, lower power, lower cost AI hardware and transformational AI software solutions in automotive, smart retail, smart city and industrial markets. In 2020, Blaize successfully released and built a multi-year pipeline for the first generation Blaize AI edge computing hardware products based on the groundbreaking Blaize GSP architecture, and the Blaize AI Studio end-to-end application lifecycle software platform.
Article Topics
Blaize | Denso | edge AI | Franklin Templeton | processor | venture capital
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