The business Recogni Inc., which is creating hardware with artificial intelligence for self-driving cars, revealed today that it has raised $102 million in a funding round headed by GreatPoint Ventures and Celesta Capital.

New and current investors joined the Series C round as well, including Mayfield, DNS Capital, BMW i Ventures Inc., and Tasaru Mobility Investments of the Public Investment Fund.

Recogni is a startup company that creates AI hardware to enable self-driving cars to visually comprehend their surroundings by utilizing sensor raw data. A significant amount of data from video and other sensors is needed for object detection, but Recogni’s hardware enables quicker recognition. According to the business, their chips enable greater processing capacity at reduced energy consumption, translating into increased efficiency.

In order to help with the development and training of AI models, a large number of AI chips on the market, such as graphics processing units provided by other significant AI hardware makers, like Nvidia Corp., concentrate on absorbing enormous volumes of raw data. On the other end of the AI development spectrum, known as interference, Recogni’s chips operate when an AI model is implemented and utilized to solve problems or generate predictions based on real-time data.

When a chatbot responds to queries or summarizes articles for a user, when a model recognizes a picture of a dog as a dog, or when an AI model categorizes spam emails, these are examples of inference for generative AI models. When driving, for instance, a car must draw conclusions from its environment, including traffic signs, road markings, and other cars that are visible to its sensors in order to modify its behavior.

The company said that Recogni’s hardware solution is practical not just for self-driving cars but also for a wide range of other industries, including biopharmaceutical, financial, healthcare, retail, entertainment, and fraud detection. This is due to its effective low-power solution.

“The critical need for solutions that directly address the key challenges in AI inference processing — compute capability, scalability, accuracy and energy savings — is more urgent than ever,” Chief Executive Marc Bolitho. “Recogni is leading this transformative wave, engineering pivotal advances that will redefine data centers and enterprise and revolutionize industries like automotive and aerospace.”

In December 2022, Recogni released its first low-power computation processor designed for autonomous vehicles, known as the Scorpio hardware solution. According to the business, it can generate 1,000 teraflops of inference for autonomous mobility at the lowest power consumption in the sector, outperforming competing solutions by 10 to 20 times in terms of power efficiency at that time.