AI startup Recogni has raised $102 million in a Series C funding round.

The round was co-led by Celesta Capital and GreatPoint Ventures, with existing investors Mayfield, DNS Capital, BMW i Ventures, and SW Mobility Fund, and new investors Pledge Ventures and Tasaru Mobility Investments – a subsidiary of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund – also participating.

Based in San Jose, California, Recogni has been designing chips for autonomous vehicles since it was founded in 2017. However, the company has pivoted in recent years to focus on designing an accelerator chip that can be used not just in both intelligent autonomous platforms and to support the development of generative AI models.

In December 2020, Recogni introduced its first low power AI compute product, dubbed Recogni Scorpio; a one petaflop “vision-inference chip” that, condition-depending, can detect objects within an accuracy of 300m.

The company said the chip also has a processing delay of less than 10ms and power consumption below 25W, which the company says “validates [its] vision and ability in breaking barriers in AI compute with scalable performance, generation over generation.”

The money raised in the Series C funding round will be used to manufacture and market the Scorpio chip.

"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,” said Marc Bolitho, CEO of Recogni.

“Recogni is leading this transformative wave, engineering pivotal advances that will redefine data centers and enterprise and revolutionize industries like automotive and aerospace.”

The company has not provided a valuation to go alongside its latest funding round. To date, it has raised $175 million.