Hailo, a company developing a proprietary chip for deep learning, announced the completion of a $12.5 million Series A round. The company’s investors include Ourcrowd.com, Maniv Mobility, the Drive accelerator fund: Next Gear, as well as angel investors, Hailo Chairman Zohar Zisapel and Delek Motors CEO Gil Agmon. The company will use the funding to further develop its deep learning processor, which the company says will deliver datacenter processing capacity to edge devices. This latest funding round brings the total raised to date by the Tel Aviv-based company to $16 million.

Hailo's deep learning processor, whose initial samples are expected to enter the market in H1 2019, is intended to run embedded artificial intelligence (AI) applications on edge devices that are installed in autonomous vehicles, drones, and smart home appliances such as personal assistants, smart cameras, and smart TVs, alongside IoT, AR and VR platforms, wearables, and security products. The Hailo processor reduces size, power, and cost, making it suitable for local processing of high-resolution sensory data in real time.

“The 70-year old architecture of existing processors is inadequate to meet today’s deep learning and AI processing needs,” said Orr Danon, Hailo CEO. “Hailo is revolutionizing the underlying architecture of the processor to boost deep learning processing by several orders of magnitude. We have completely redesigned the pillars of computer architecture—memory, control and compute—and the relations between them."

Hailo’s leadership team includes Orr Danon, CEO; Avi Baum, CTO; and Hadar Zeitlin, Chief Business Development Officer. Danon served in a top Israel Defense Forces technology unit and is a recipient of the Israel Defense Prize. Baum held several senior engineering management positions at Texas Instruments, including serving as CTO for the Wireless Connectivity Group. Zeitlin also served in the same IDF technology unit for nine years and was awarded the Chief of Staff Prize for technological excellence.