Existing investors, including Mayfield, DNS Capital, BMW i Ventures, and SW Mobility Fund, participated in the round. New investors, Pledge Ventures and Tasaru Mobility Investments, a company fully owned by Public Investment Fund (PIF), joined, with HSBC Innovation Banking providing debt. The investment will support the development of next-generation systems for AI inference solutions that enhance performance and power efficiency, offering the lowest total cost of ownership.

Challenges in AI innovation hinder its widespread adoption across various markets. As AI technology evolves and model sizes grow, the need for more performant and power-efficient AI inference solutions becomes imperative. These advancements are essential for expanding AI applications sustainably. Recogni's scalable and power-efficient AI inference acceleration method aims to open new possibilities in AI computing, particularly in generative AI and intelligent autonomy, by addressing these challenges.

Marc Bolitho, CEO of Recogni, points out the urgent gap between rapidly expanding AI models and the slower evolution of computing capability. "The critical need for solutions that directly address the key challenges in AI inference processing—compute capability, scalability, accuracy, and energy savings—is more urgent than ever. Recogni is leading this transformative wave, engineering pivotal advances that will redefine data centers and enterprise and revolutionize industries like automotive and aerospace," he said.

Current AI acceleration solutions will not scale for tomorrow’s AI needs. Cloud-based AI training and inference predominantly utilize power-intensive GPUs (graphics processing units), exerting substantial stress on the compute capacity, cooling, and power systems of data centers. Such demands render the process financially and ecologically unsustainable. Recogni is offering a fundamental change in inference processing to solve the AI compute issue from the ground up with scalability that can stand the test of time.

“When you have a solution that achieves 10x higher compute density, 10x lower power and 13x less cost per query, it’s a no-brainer to invest and help bring that solution to market,” said Ashok Krishnamurthi, managing partner at GreatPoint Ventures. “The compute demand for AI applications is going to be significantly more than what the experts are forecasting, and addressing the power consumption piece of the puzzle is critical at this stage resulting in significantly lower operational costs. The repeat investment and high caliber of new investors in the C round is a true testament to Recogni’s team and technology.”

“Generative AI systems in the market today are highly inefficient and consume too much power while adding system complexity, but Recogni’s proven technology is raising the bar on power performance to address the large compute needs of AI workloads,” said Sriram Viswanathan, Celesta Capital founding managing partner and chairman of Recogni’s Board of Directors. “With the rapid AI proliferation over the past year, there is a clear need for Recogni’s products, which are purpose-built for efficient inference compute. We’re pleased to support the company’s ability to meet market demand with its innovative solutions and look forward to seeing them continue to expand their exciting product offering.”

Recogni introduced Recogni Scorpio, its first low power AI compute product, in December 2022.  Scorpio is the world’s first 1000 TFLOPS (1 Peta-Flop) class inference solution at the lowest power for various inference applications. Scorpio’s performance validates Recogni’s vision and ability in breaking barriers in AI compute with scalable performance, generation over generation.