On Tuesday, the official release of The Frontier Technology has obtained a new round of financing of tens of millions of dollars. The round of funds, led by Tsinghua-based investment institution Zhuoyuan Capital, will be mainly used for product research and development investment, as well as to expand sales and marketing activities.
According to public information, Exploration Technology was established in March 2017, and its core business focuses on providing the best edge AI chips and solutions for various types of Internet of Things terminals. At present, through chip architecture innovation and algorithm research and development, we have overcome the challenges of AI voice landing face the lack of computing power to support large-scale high-precision voice algorithms, and plan to start from the smart home market with the best landing effect and a large number of terminals, to provide traditional home appliance manufacturers with an intelligent upgrade solution that is easy to deploy with a comprehensive experience.
Exploration Technology said that its self-developed memory-first chip architecture (SFA architecture) has solved the storage wall problem, supported all neural networks, and realized terminal offline inference and training. Based on this architecture, multi-scenario chips such as speech, image, and cloud inference are carried out, which have many advantages such as small area, high energy efficiency ratio, and low cost.
Lu Yong, the founder of Exploration Technology, is a bachelor's degree in physics, a master's degree and a doctorate in the department of electronics of Tsinghua University, and has 20 years of experience in the chip industry. Lu Yong has worked in Silicon Valley digital analog, Marvell and other companies, is the head of Marvell's chip research and development department in China, has managed the Sino-US team at the same time, and has rich experience in product design and management and industry chain resources in communications, storage, consumer chips and other aspects.
Over the past year, Exploration has made rapid progress in both product and business.
At the product level, the company's chip products have expanded from "Whirlwind VOI611" to the 621, 721, 311 series product matrix to meet the product needs of different scenarios. Since mass production in July 2019, the first AI speech recognition chip VOI611 has won the recognition of many customers for its good recognition, low power consumption and easy integration. Compared with a generation of products, the second generation of the sound cyclone built-in LDO, OSC, Flash and other electronic components, with a high degree of integration, that is, customers reduce procurement time, and reduce the test link, only a few simple peripheral devices can achieve a complete program, saving time and labor, effectively reducing the overall BOM cost.
In terms of business, this year's chip products have entered the supply chains of many major customers, covering white electricity, small household appliances, lighting, electrical and other industries, and are widely sold to China, East Asia and Southeast Asia, Europe and South America and other markets. Leifeng Network