From EE|Times, March 7:
Edge AI chip company GrAI Matter Labs was reportedly acquired quietly in fall 2023 by Snap, Inc., the parent company of social media site Snapchat, according to a French media report. While there are dozens of edge AI chip startups today, this acquisition would represent a rare exit for a startup in this sector to date.
A report in the French media on the acquisition was shared on social media this past October by one of GrAI Matter’s cofounders, but later deleted. The same cofounder later shared a post congratulating GrAI Matter’s team on the company’s acquisition.
GrAI Matter CEO Ingolf Held has since changed his LinkedIn job title to director of hardware engineering at Snap, Inc, and changed his profile picture to himself wearing Snap’s New Spectacles, an AR glasses product from Snap that isn’t currently on sale to the public. He’s still listed as a team member on GrAI Matter’s website.
Neither GrAI Matter, Snap, Inc. or Ingolf Held immediately responded to comment requests from EE Times.
Stateful neurons
GrAI Matter was founded in 2016 with a $1 million grant from DARPA to commercialize research from the Vision Institute in Paris, France. The Silicon Valley startup has an office in Paris, which focuses on machine learning and applications, and a silicon design site in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. The company raised close to $30 million in funding to develop its technology into an SoC—GrAI VIP—and it currently lists 36 employees on its website.GrAI VIP uses the company’s third-gen AI acceleration microarchitecture, which is digital but vaguely brain-inspired, using sparsity concepts that look for commonality in successive video frames to avoid processing the same data multiple times. Stateful neurons are used to preserve a memory of what has happened in the past....
....MUCH MORE
