Pune, Maharashtra, India | 19th July 2021: A Pune based deep-tech startup, EDGENeural.ai has raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding from Anicut Angel Fund, the equity arm of Anicut Capital. The funding round saw participation from other investors including Venkat Raju, 9Unicorns, Samir Inamdar, Dilip Angal along with prominent angel investors. The company is leading a paradigm shift in AI to empower AI practitioners, engineers and startups with tools to deploy Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) on resource constraint, low-power and cost-effective hardware as well as optimise production models for improved accuracy and performance. To enable this, the new investment/funding will help the company to further scale its engineering, product support and sales team, and make the product seamless for the customers globally.
To bridge the challenges in the burgeoning Edge ecosystem, Sarvesh Devi and Dhairya Badiyani founded EDGENeural.ai in 2020. The company is building a unified, cloud neutral, hardware agnostic platform ENAP that can automatically craft robust, scalable, and efficient deep neural network solutions for Edge devices ready for production at scale. It is the only company in India building an end-to-end workflow solution focused on improving the efficacy of AI algorithms and models for Edge devices, providing engineers/developers with a modular fully-integrated workflow designed to train, optimize, deploy and manage Edge AI neural networks.
Some of the features worth mentioning are:(1) Accelerating the time-to-market for Edge AI Development by up to 5X (2) Reducing total cost of application by up to 75% percent (3) Optimizing latency by up to 7X while preserving accuracy to enhance performance and lower memory footprint and (4) Open architecture and integrations into popular model training tools and frameworks.
The company was initially bootstrapped and is currently backed by the NVIDIA Inception Program, T-Hub, StartupIndia, Microsoft for Startups, Nasscom DeepTech Club 2.0
Speaking about the fresh round of funding, Sarvesh Devi, Co-founder & CTO, EDGENeural.ai said, “We are delighted to have Anicut invest in our vision and help us scale our operations. It shows its trust in our innovative platform and the way we are rapidly scaling up the businesses, unleashing creativity and fully utilizing the AI potential of the platform. This also underscores our role in building a platform that accelerates the process of deploying AI on the Edge, thereby tackling the complexity and diversity of neural network models.”
Dhairya Badiyani, Co-founder & COO, EDGENeural.ai said,“We aspire to offer a better product-market fit with a low code, modular, fully integrated, hardware agnostic and cloud neutral platform to enable developers to build and scale Edge AI Solutions not just in a few months, but in merely a few hours. This will also help them deploy and manage AI applications securely on the fly.”
He further added, “The funding we have received demonstrates the confidence investors have in us. We are grateful for their support.”
“As investors, we see a lot of value in the technology created at EDGENeural.ai, which in turn will unlock new opportunities for many businesses across different industries.What impressed us most was a strong and unique business model – one that is easily scalable in India and beyond. We are delighted to make this contribution,” said Ashvin Chadha, Co-founder, Anicut Angel Fund.
“Edge Computing has a massive market opportunity; but it’s adoption has been stymied by developers forced to make significant compromises with tools and technologies built in a different era and/or repurposed from cloud (hub) centric architectures. EDGENeural’s platform, purpose built by Edge AI developers for fellow developers and stakeholders such as (Edge) device manufacturers and others, should help accelerate and fully realize the potential of Edge computing. We are looking forward to be a part of EDGENeural for the long term and to accelerate growth as well as build a global company,” said Venkat Raju, a serial entrepreneur & investor.
“The rolling out of 5G in India sets the stage for a wide-scale implementation of Edge computing, and we believe EDGENeural.ai can play a pivotal role in fast-tracking this adoption by democratizing access to robust and scalable deep neural network solutions. Its cloud-neural and sector-agnostic platform will not only empower enterprises and AI practitioners but also push Edge computing to the next level. We are delighted to be a part of EDGENeural’s journey and we are confident that the startup will bring a big wave of transformation in the industry,” said Abhijeet Pai, 9Unicorns.
