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Hardware that responds to voice commands is already out there and probably in your hand or house right now. Whether it\u2019s a smartphone, smart speaker or wearable, it has to connect to the cloud to deliver answers to your questions. Now, a startup called Mythic<\/a> (formerly known as Isocline) is launching a chip and software that will change all that, putting voice control, computer vision and other kinds of AI into our devices locally, no cloud required.<\/p>\n Headquartered in Austin, with offices in Redwood City, Calif. Mythic has raised $9.3 million in venture funding, including angel capital and a Series A round of funding, according to CEO and co-founder Mike Henry. Mythic\u2019s Series A round was led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson<\/a> joined by Lux Capital<\/a>, Data Collective<\/a>, and AME Cloud Ventures<\/a>. DFJ\u2019s Steve Jurvetson and Lux Capital\u2019s Shahin Farshchi have joined the startup\u2019s board of directors.<\/p>\n Prior to their Series A, Mythic had raised about $2.5 million in government grants. The new funding will help\u00a0the startup\u00a0begin to commercialize its chips, which are about the size of a small shirt button, and proprietary software that make them work alongside other processors and memory.<\/p>\n Mythic\u2019s chip enables AI features to run locally on any device.<\/em><\/p>\n DFJ Partner\u00a0Steve Jurvetson, <\/a>who was an early backer of SpaceX, Tesla and Nervana Systems (now owned by Intel) said:<\/p>\n \u201cWhat Mythic has built is a deep learning or neural network chip that implements learning algorithms at a radically lower price point, chip size and power consumption level than anything we have today.<\/p>\n With this, you could put machine intelligence into a toaster, or a Roomba, a security camera, or all kinds of devices where it wouldn\u2019t make sense before because you\u2019d need a persistent internet connection to make it useful.\u201d<\/p>\n The influential and self-proclaimed\u00a0\u201cVC geek\u201d views Mythic\u2019s market opportunity as wide-ranging. He predicted,\u00a0\u201cThe industrial internet of things is becoming the sensory cortex of the planet. Industrial and enterprise customers will want\u00a0to use this to do inspection and quality control wherever they have a sort of sensor node, whether it\u2019s a camera, a microphone, a temperature sensor or something else.\u201d<\/p>\n The inspiration for Mythic\u2019s technology dates back to 2012, when Henry and co-founder and CTO Dave Fick were both graduating from different labs with doctorates in computer science. The friends made an early bet that deep neural networks and machine learning approaches to software development would eventually require more powerful compute resources in the devices and machines we use daily. Nobody was calling it \u201cAI\u201d yet, but insiders were talking about deep learning as the key to making devices that see, hear and interact with the world with human-like qualities.<\/p>\n Mythic CEO and cofounder Mike Henry.<\/em><\/p>\n Today, the CEO said, that bet is starting to pay off.\u00a0\u201cA lot of devices and applications are taking in too much data to send to the cloud. Like think about drones with multiple, high-res images coming through the cameras. All they need to find is the crack on a turbine or dry patches of farm land. If they process all that data through the cloud, and run analytics with complex algorithms, they\u2019ll drain their batteries and have to land. We saw opportunity to do processing locally inside a device.\u201d<\/p>\n Henry said that the company has been hiring aggressively since closing its Series A round at the end of 2016. It\u00a0will continue to do that while reaching out to potential pilot customers. Long-term Mythic\u2019s cofounders hope to bring their technology to\u00a0automakers building autonomous vehicles.\u00a0However, the CEO said,\u00a0consumer electronics, drone and robotics companies, which tend to move from design to production more quickly, will most likely be among Mythic\u2019s earliest\u00a0users.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Featured Image: Torsak Thammachote<\/a>\/Shutterstock<\/a><\/small><\/p>\n Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunchIt\/~3\/1Sp9SK_MX8A\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hardware that responds to voice commands is already out there and probably in your hand or house right now. Whether it\u2019s a smartphone, smart speaker or wearable, it has to <\/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-4260","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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.rsoftsolution.com\/blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/RSSPoster_PRO\/cache\/e47df_mythic_ai_chip.png?resize=300%2C213&ssl=1\")
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