The investment will be used to make fund engineering, product development, and team expansion
Prabhjeet Bhatla July 16, 2021 4 min readOpinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Pune-based deeptech startup EDGENeural.AI has raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding from Anicut Angel Fund, the equity arm of Anicut Capital. The funding round saw participation from other investors including Venkat Raju, 9Unicorns, Samir Inamdar, Dilip Angal along prominent angel investors.
According to Sarvesh Devi, co-founder and chief technology officer, EDGENeural.ai, “We are delighted to have Anicut invest in our vision and help us scale our operations. It shows its trust in our innovative platform and the way we are rapidly scaling up the businesses, unleashing creativity, and fully utilizing the AI potential of the platform. This also underscores our role in building a platform that accelerates the process of deploying AI on the edge, thereby tackling the complexity and diversity of neural network models,”
The company is leading a paradigm shift in AI to empower AI practitioners, engineers, and startups with tools to deploy Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) on resource constraints, low-power and cost-effective hardware as well as optimize production models for improved accuracy and performance. To enable this, the new investment/funding will help the company to further scale its engineering, product support, and sales team, and make the product seamless for the customers globally. ADVERTISING
“We aspire to offer a better product-market fit with a low code, modular, fully integrated, hardware agnostic, and cloud-neutral platform to enable developers to build and scale Edge AI Solutions not just in a few months, but in merely a few hours. This will also help them deploy and manage AI applications securely on the fly. The funding we have received demonstrates the confidence investors have in us. We are grateful for their support,” said Dhairya Badiyani, co-founder and chief operating officer, EDGENeural.ai.
To bridge the challenges in the burgeoning EDGE ecosystem, Sarvesh Devi and Dhairya Badiyani founded EDGENeural.AI in 2020. The company is building a unified, cloud-neutral, hardware-agnostic platform ENAP that can automatically craft robust, scalable, and efficient deep neural network solutions for EDGE devices ready for production at scale. It is the only company in India building an end-to-end workflow solution focused on improving the efficacy of AI algorithms and models for EDGE devices, providing engineers/ developers with a modular fully integrated workflow designed to train, optimize, deploy and manage edge AI neural networks.
“As investors, we see a lot of value in the technology created at EDGENeural.ai, which in turn will unlock new opportunities for many businesses across different industries. What impressed us most was a strong and unique business model – one that is easily scalable in India and beyond. We are delighted to make this contribution,” shared Ashvin Chadha, co-founder, Anicut Angel Fund.
The company was initially bootstrapped and is currently backed by the NVIDIA Inception Program, T-Hub, StartupIndia, Microsoft for Startups, Nasscom DeepTech Club 2.0.
“Edge Computing has a massive market opportunity, but its adoption has been stymied by developers forced to make significant compromises with tools and technologies built in a different era and/or repurposed from cloud (hub) centric architectures. EDGENeural’s platform, purpose-built by Edge AI developers for fellow developers and stakeholders such as (edge) device manufacturers and others, should help accelerate and fully realize the potential of edge computing. We are looking forward to being a part of EDGENeural for the long term and accelerating growth as well as build a global company,” commented Venkat Raju, serial entrepreneur and investor.
“The rolling out of 5G in India sets the stage for wide-scale implementation of edge computing, and we believe EDGENeural.ai can play a pivotal role in fast-tracking this adoption by democratizing access to robust and scalable deep neural network solutions. Its cloud-neural and sector-agnostic platform will not only empower enterprises and AI practitioners but also push edge computing to the next level. We are delighted to be a part of EDGENeural’s journey and we are confident that the startup will bring a big wave of transformation in the industry,” added Abhijeet Pai, 9Unicorns.
