Back in 2021, Hailo became a unicorn thanks to its AI processors, which come with an interesting twist. Now, it announces another round of recruitment on the way to compete with the giant powers.
Most of the advanced GenAI developments we see nowadays, such as DALL-E or ChatGPT and the like, end up running in datacenters, on monstrous supercomputers that currently contain thousands of NVIDIA GPUs. But in the end, we’d all like that instead of all this goodness running somewhere on a remote server, the AI tools could run locally, on top of our end devices, and that’s exactly what Hailo does. The company develops a dedicated processor capable of running AI applications on end devices installed in various devices such as drones, smart home products, cameras, televisions, AR/VR products, wearable products, various IoT devices and more.
Hailo was founded in February 2017 by Or Danon, Avi Baum and Hadar Zeitlin. Today the company employs about 250 people in its offices in Israel, the United States, Europe, China, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea.
Or Danon, CEO of Hailo, says that – in the last two years the company has made several leaps, launching different variants of Hailo-8 which it announced in 2021. Among other things, it has variants that can run on security systems connected to a large number of cameras, variants adapted to the automotive, robotics, pharma industries, and more – and give them new capabilities based on artificial intelligence, such as improving video quality, analysis, gaining insights, and more.
Now the company announces Hailo-10 , intended more for the worlds of personal computers, smart vehicles, robots and more.
The company’s new AI accelerator should allow such products, even if they have low CPU performance, to run chatbots, operating systems, and various Generative AI experiences, on the device itself, independent of a network connection, and with huge energy savings. The company claims that it is possible to process a large language model with a power of less than 5 watts, and to produce an image from textual prompts in less than 5 seconds.
According to Danon, the real innovation is the ability of users to become “owners of the GenAI engine, large language models and image creation locally on the personal laptop even offline, in real time without delay, without paying monthly subscription fees, and in a way that protects privacy and information security”. According to Danon, the transition from the cloud to the end devices optimizes the process, and saves on electricity and cooling.
Danon says – “We see this industry growing day by day. The customers who work with us and the customers who want to work with us come from dozens of different and diverse industries, and every day we discover another application that can be improved using artificial intelligence. I do not foresee a lull in the field, but rather an extensive increase in the scope of use And in the variety of products and platforms that provide an improved response through artificial intelligence.”
The unique architecture of our processors allows for very high efficiency with low power consumption, which allows our portfolio today to provide a very broad response to all end platforms – vehicles, cameras, computers, etc.”
Besides the unveiling of the new accelerator, Hailo also announces the expansion of its funding round (C) from 2021, when it raised $136 million, becoming a unicorn. Now, it is expanding the round with an additional 120 million dollars from a group of new and existing investors including: the Zisapel family, Gil Agmon, Delek Motors, Alfred Akirov, the investment company DCLBA, Vasuki, OurCrowd, Talcar, Comasco, Automotive Equipment (AEV) and Poalim Equity. In total, since its establishment, the company has raised 340 million dollars.