Hyderabad: Hyderabad-based Blaize raised $71 million (over Rs 520 crore) in Series D round of funding. Franklin Templeton, a new investor, and Temasek, an existing investor, led the round, along with participation from Denso and other new and existing investors.
The company plans to accelerate its product roadmap and scale the business with this funding, and rapidly expand their Hyderabad operations in the next 12-18 months.
“Blaize has demonstrated the capability to enable value creation for organisations tapping the power of AI for edge computing,” said JP Scandalios, senior vice president and portfolio manager, Franklin Templeton.
“Automotive, and numerous edge AI markets, such as retail and metro, hold tremendous potential for Blaize to expand on their early market position as the adoption of AI at the edge accelerates, creating a new wave of industrial systems,” he added.
Khen Nam Lee, deputy chairman, Vertex Venture Holdings, said, “The prospects are substantial. Today Blaize is delivering to customers a distinct fusion of AI hardware and AI Studio end-to-end software platform that leads the industry in productization of high-value knowledge-drives edge computing solutions.”
“Blaize System on Chip (SoCs) for automotive edge and central compute functions are accelerating electric vehicles and future architectural ambitions of automotive OEMs,” said Tony Cannestra, director, Corporate Ventures, Denso.
Cannestra added, “With substantial power advantages making electric vehicles more efficient and economical, Blaize SoCs offer best in class performance with lower power across in-cabin, out of vehicle, and autonomous operations, enabling a streamlined architectural evolution to centralise compute.”
Dinakar Munagala, CEO, Blaize said, “We are well positioned to accelerate our next generation products and sustain our lead in delivering integrated hardware and software offerings that enable true value creation for our customers.”
The funding will support acceleration of the product roadmap to meet growing demand for higher performance, lower power, lower cost AI hardware and transformational AI software solutions in automotive, smart retail, smart city and industrial markets.
Blaize plans to strengthen its talent base in India by hiring engineers and AI technology experts across functions including hardware design, software development, verification, research and customer services.
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