Former NASA chief launches neural tech company with $100M investment
Dan Goldin, who led the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in the 1990s, officially unveiled a company with more than $100 million in private investment to focus on neural computing.
The company KnuEdge was founded in 2005, but its two divisions -- one focused on voice biometrics and the other on data center neural computing -- worked in stealth mode to bring its first two products to maturity.
KnuEdge boasts that its voice recognition and authentication product, called KnuVerse, is military-grade technology that spent five years in production in "mission-critical battlefield conditions."
It's now available for enterprises interested in building human-voice interfaces that can function in noisy, real-world environments. It can be used to build authentication systems into computers, web or mobile apps and IoT devices, relying on just a few words in any language.
"KnuVerse has already driven millions in revenue, and although we have just begun selling commercially, we have significant interest from Fortune 500 companies in the banking, healthcare and entertainment industries," Kate Dilligan, EVP of KnuVerse, said in a statement.
KnuEdge is also officially launching KnuPath, a neural computing processing technology for data centers and IoT devices. The company says it enables "ground-breaking scalability, latency and workload performance."
The KnuPath Hermosa processor has 256 processor cores and can scale up to 512,000 devices.
KnuPath comes on the heels of other major efforts to develop AI-powered processing, such as Google's custom-built Tensor Processing Unit (TPU).