Qualcomm purchases the AI platform Edge Impulse to enhance its Dragonwing chips.

      Edge Impulse, a member of the TNW community that develops an AI platform for developers, has been acquired by the American chip giant Qualcomm for an undisclosed amount. Qualcomm stated that the acquisition of Edge Impulse aims to enhance its machine learning software capabilities, especially for its Dragonwing series of AI-based chips.

      Nakul Duggal, Qualcomm's IoT leader, mentioned that this acquisition would reinforce his company’s "leadership in AI" and improve “essential sectors including retail, security, energy and utilities, supply chain management, and asset management.”

      As part of the agreement, Edge Impulse will merge its operations with Qualcomm’s while keeping its own offices, staff, and website intact.

      “Our team and mission remain unchanged; however, we will now have greater opportunities and capabilities to accelerate what we excel at,” said Zach Shelby, co-founder and CEO of Edge Impulse.

      Shelby, an engineer and entrepreneur from Finland, co-founded Edge Impulse in 2019 with Jan Jongboom from the Netherlands. They met while collaborating on IoT systems at the British chip company Arm.

      At Edge Impulse, Shelby and Jongboom developed a platform that significantly reduces the time required to create machine learning models for small devices like sensors, microcontrollers, and cameras. Shelby noted that the team recognized a significant market gap.

      “By understanding that the computational abilities of microcontrollers had evolved to the level where they could run domain-specific AI models directly on-device, we realized there were countless use cases that could benefit from transitioning AI from the cloud to the edge,” he wrote in a blog post.

      To date, Edge Impulse has raised $54.3 million. In 2021, the company secured $34 million in Series B funding with a valuation of $234 million. Two years later, it reported revenues of $14.7 million. Its platform is currently utilized by over 170,000 developers to create, deploy, and monitor AI models at the edge.

      Shelby attributed the platform’s success to its ability to help developers eliminate tedious and manual tasks when implementing AI in edge devices.

      “Edge Impulse provides developers with a tool that automates data collection, simplifies model training, offers advanced optimization tools, and enables one-click deployment to various types of hardware, from MCUs to CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs,” he stated.

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