Artificial intelligence (AI) chip company Kneron has raised $49 million.
The startup raised funding from investors including Foxconn HH-CTBC Partnership (Foxconn Co-GP Fund) and Alltek, bringing the total Series B financing to $97m and overall funding to $190m. Horizons Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, and Sequoia are prior investors.
“Powerful GPT models are mostly still running out of cloud data centers," Albert Liu, founder and CEO of Kneron, said.
"This results in a slew of issues, including high latency, high data transfer costs, and inadequacies in user privacy and security protection. Kneron’s solutions resolve these industry bottlenecks by creating hyper-efficient AI chips."
The company develops variants of its 'neural processing unit' (NPU) chip, a low power CPU, for autonomous vehicles, Edge servers, and Internet of Things devices.
The latest funding will primarily be used to help the company expand in the automotive compute market, Kneron said.
CEO Liu told CNBC that Kneron will also partner with new investor Foxconn to “accelerate the deployment of advanced AI," as well as develop “an ultra-lightweight AI chip that operates” for generative pre-trained, or GPT, models from the cloud.
