{"id":2897,"date":"2017-01-17T18:44:56","date_gmt":"2017-01-17T18:44:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rsoftsolution.com\/blog\/neurala-closes-14m-series-a-to-bring-machine-learning-to-the-edge.html"},"modified":"2017-01-17T18:44:56","modified_gmt":"2017-01-17T18:44:56","slug":"neurala-closes-14m-series-a-to-bring-machine-learning-to-the-edge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rbsitsoftwaresolution.in\/blog\/neurala-closes-14m-series-a-to-bring-machine-learning-to-the-edge.html","title":{"rendered":"Neurala closes $14M Series A to bring machine learning to the edge"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Artificial intelligence is swiftly becoming a commodity thanks to the rise of AI-as-a-Service offerings from Amazon and IBM. Today, Neurala<\/a> is joining this list thanks to a $14 million Series A led by Pelion\u00a0Ventures<\/a>. The team is\u00a0looking to put AI in the hands of toy makers, drone enthusiasts and IoT engineers alike.<\/p>\n

Neurala\u2019s real value-proposition is its\u00a0ability to execute machine learning frameworks, locally, with limited resources. The startup promises incremental learning so that devices, not connected to a network, can continue to learn and update after field deployment. For time-sensitive industries, being able to compute and train locally is critical.<\/p>\n

\u201cLarge companies collecting tons of data like Google, Facebook and Uber hold an advantage to train on a specific data set,\u201d said Massimiliano Versace, CEO of Neurala.\u201dBut using very high-end supercomputers to do lots of processing doesn\u2019t meet all the needs of the commercial market.\u201d<\/p>\n

Versace (yes, of relation to the\u00a0fashion house Versace) is one of four co-founders at Neurala, all of whom share\u00a0cognitive and neural systems Ph.D.s from Boston University.\u00a0Their core\u00a0product, the\u00a0Neurala Brain, manifests itself as a fairly generalized out-of-the-box SDK offering called\u00a0Brains for Bots. But, for the majority of customers, it should be enough.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

The Neurala founding team<\/p>\n

Take Teal Drones as an example. Lacking a specialty in machine learning, the drone company\u2019s founder George Matus is using Neurala to power a \u201cfollow-me\u201d feature on its speedy craft.\u00a0<\/a>Opting for a third-party solution over something in-house can help startups, without a core competency in machine learning, save RD money and get a product\u00a0to market in a reasonable time.<\/p>\n

For customers that need a bit more, Neurala offers a data ingestion service where it will train and finesse a model to serve a niche\u00a0use case.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are customers who\u00a0would need to\u00a0send up a drone to monitor and inspect power lines and in real-time send back information\u00a0based on the machine\u00a0learning done on the drone,\u201d said\u00a0Ben Lambert, senior associate at Pelion Ventures.<\/p>\n

Facebook and other large tech companies are exploring the idea of on-device local training. Style Transfer is a great example <\/a>of pushing machine learning directly to devices to run in real-time, but the company still needed to complete initial training in-house. There are fundamental limits around compute power right now, but certain use cases with smaller amounts of data might not\u00a0always require the server farm approach.<\/p>\n

Neurala is hardware agnostic, capable of scaling from low-end CPUs to high-end GPUs, and able to\u00a0pull from a number of frameworks including Tensorflow. The Neurala SDK works with Linux, Android and iOS. And if your problem calls for it, the startup also offers a server-based solution.<\/p>\n

This effectively means that Neurala has three separate business models. The server-based option complements the training service and traditional software license fee distribution model.<\/p>\n

In addition to\u00a0Pelion Ventures, Sherpa Capital, Motorola Ventures, 360 Capital Partners, Draper Associates Investments and Idinvest Partners are also participating in today\u2019s round.\u00a0Motorola Ventures is particularly of note\u00a0as Motorola Solutions is one of Neurala\u2019s early customers.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunchIt\/~3\/-T1ozpceQa0\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Artificial intelligence is swiftly becoming a commodity thanks to the rise of AI-as-a-Service offerings from Amazon and IBM. Today, Neurala is joining this list thanks to a $14 million Series <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[19],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-2897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-enterprise-software","tag-enterprise"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t