Quadric, an emerging AI edge processing firm, has added $10 million in debt and equity funding to the $21 million Series B round of financing it announced in early 2022, with Xerox Ventures, the venture capital arm of Xerox Holdings, and Mesh Ventures joining Series B round leaders Denso and Megachips.
The revelation comes one month after Quadric announced its Chimera General Purpose Neural Processing Unit (GPNPU), targeted at on-device AI processing at the network edge. The company has described its GPNPUs as being able to accelerate the entire machine learning inference application pipeline on-device without the need for processing by CPU clusters.
“The edge AI industry is on the verge of massive growth, and the flexibility and scalability of Quadric’s technology is paving the way for new capabilities in AI computing,” said Chris Fisher, managing partner of Xerox Ventures, in a statement. “Quadric’s founding team has a unique combination of deep technical expertise in hardware design and software programming, and a thorough understanding of the challenges faced by enterprises when deploying machine learning compute solutions at scale. The company’s processor IP provides chip design teams with advanced machine learning inference capability as well as pre-and-post processing tools they can deploy quickly without the need to build their own technology from scratch.”
“The market has enthusiastically received the announcement of the Chimera GPNPU,” said Veerbhan Kheterpal, Co-founder and CEO of Quadric, in a separate statement. “We are rapidly ramping up our commercial teams to engage customers and continuing to expand our top-notch engineering organization to deliver our GPNPU and our world-class software tools for application development. This Series B funding extension gives us even more financial firepower to bolster that expansion.”
Quadric is just one of numerous companies that have been targeting what could be a $9.6 billion market for edge AI processors by 2030, according to Allied Market Research. Jack Gold, principal analyst at J. Gold Associates, previously has told Fierce Electronics that there could be near-term upheaval in this market as start-ups and major semiconductor players jockey for mind share and market share.
Based in Burlingame, California, Quadric announced its initial edge AI processor architecture in June 2021.