Innatera bags €15M for mass production of brain-inspired processor

Innatera Nanosystems has announced the successful closing of an investment round in which it has raised 15 million euros to bring its ultra-low-power neuromorphic processors to sensors and sensor-based devices. The money comes from Invest-NL’s Deep Tech Fund, the EIC Fund and existing backers MIG Capital, Matterwave Ventures and Delft Enterprises. It enables the TU Delft spinoff to accelerate the ramp-up of volume production, broaden the applicability of its products and scale up customer collaborations.

Innatera’s neuromorphic processing chip closely mimics the brain’s mechanisms for pattern recognition, enabling sensor data to be processed 100x faster and with up to 500x less energy than with conventional processors. These efficiency and performance gains allow advanced AI to be embedded into the sensor edge, unlocking a wide gamut of applications including intelligent speech processing in human-machine interfaces, vitals monitoring in wearable devices, target recognition in radars and lidars, and fault detection in industrial and automotive equipment.

According to Innatera, its solution is radically different from the traditional AI chips being proposed by its competitors and fundamentally changes how sensor data is processed. The technology relies on a new breed of analog/mixed-signal computing circuits that recreate the behavior of the brain’s fundamental building blocks – spiking neurons and synapses. Neural networks built with spiking neurons possess a precise notion of time, which enables them to be 10-100x more compact than conventional artificial neural networks, especially for applications involving data with high spatial and temporal correlations. As a result of this approach, Innatera’s patented architecture delivers a combination of ultra-low-power and ultra-short recognition latency, with up to 10,000x higher performance per watt than typical digital processors and conventional AI accelerators.

At the CES 2024 this January, Innatera unveiled the first-ever neuromorphic microcontroller – the Spiking Neural Processor T1. The chip enables powerful signal processing and pattern recognition with a power of less than one milliwatt. In Las Vegas, the company also demonstrated radar and audio applications on the T1, built in collaboration with leading sensor vendors. Furthermore, it announced the availability of its Talamo SDK, which simplifies the development of brain-inspired spiking neural networks through integration with the Pytorch framework.

“We’re on a mission to provide intelligence to one billion sensors by 2030,” comments Innatera CEO Sumeet Kumar. “This investment brings us one step closer to our goal. I’m proud of what our teams have achieved with the T1 and the applications we’ve built with our customers and partners."