Cron AI, a leading DeepTech company building a 3D Data Edge perception platform, has raised $4 million as part of its Series A funding. The round was led by VenturEast and Kitaki Ventures, along with participation from existing investor, YourNest Venture Capital.
Cron AI’s senseEDGE™ technology addresses the acceleration requirements of 3D sensing, perception, and processing at the sensing edge. With this funding, Cron AI will be able to accelerate the delivery of senseEDGE™ into new markets to power the core of autonomous systems and automated machines to shape the future.
Founded by Tushar Chhabra and Saurav Agarwala, Cron AI has developed a real-time AI, Deep Learning-enabled edge inferencing platform accelerating algorithms and neural networks on the product edge. Cron’s unique real-time scalable and dynamic hardware and software architecture, designed from the ground up, enables innovators to develop intelligent solutions using 3D sensors to accurately perceive and learn the real world, which is critical for applications like autonomous vehicles, mobility, logistics, robotics, intelligent transport infrastructure, smart spaces and security applications set to benefit from consistent high-quality decision-making data.
Dr. Srikanth Sundararajan, General Partner at VenturEast, said: “There is high demand for deep learning deployment on the edge for real-time data inferencing, including 3D image extraction. Many industries are rapidly shifting away from the traditional centralized cloud model to the compute at the edge. Our investment thesis on this space is strong, thus we were keen to invest in Cron AI with their specific focus on edge computing, and differentiated IP as it relates to perception technology. We believe in the vision of Cron AI’s founders, and the unique IP differentiated solution for addressing computation scaling of the edge leveraging FPGA platforms.
“We have seen Cron AI grow from strength to strength over the last few years as a sharply focussed DeepTech and AI platform bringing 3D perception to reality through senseEDGE™. As a fully developed edge compute platform, it will fast track the adoption of 3D perception across multiple use cases globally,” said Girish Shivani, ED and Fund Manager, YourNest Venture Capital.
Neeraj Das, the Managing Partner at Kitaki Ventures, said: “We are excited to partner with Cron AI as the team continues building a world-class 3D data edge perception and an IP pool that is uniquely capable of delivering 3D sensing perception processing for a range of applications. We continue to be impressed by the sustained innovation and development that it has demonstrated to date.”
The senseEDGE™ platform is in advanced stages of development, with several patents already filed and ‘test kits’ set to be shipped to global customers in H2 2021. With this funding, Cron AI plans to develop its technology further and accelerate the delivery of its platform senseEDGE™ in currently untapped markets.
Tushar Chhabra, co-founder, and CEO at Cron AI, said: “The 3D sensing and automated systems markets are moving towards moon-shot growth, as evidenced by the recent successful SPACs across the value chain. This new investment demonstrates the confidence our investors have in our approach and vision towards becoming the heart of an autonomous future. We are now poised towards global expansion to deliver truly adaptive perception to innovators and allow them to accelerate productization, mitigate time and investment risks, and bring standardization to an extremely fragmented market.”
Mansi Verma, Sr. Investment Manager at VenturEast, said: “Cron’s platform offers significant performance benefits, in terms of higher throughput along with lower latency and reduced power consumption, making Cron the partner for choice for leading OEMs and LiDAR companies based in Europe and North America. Cron has demonstrated how innovative deep tech products for global markets can be built out of India.”
Tushar concluded: “Ultimately, our aim is to take 3D data perception to singularity. We believe the automated future must be built around a completely reimagined revolutionary and adaptive architecture for processing 3D sensor data, and this is precisely what our platform is optimized to deliver.”
SenseEDGE™ will deliver an out-of-the-box solution enabling innovators to migrate and support the next generations of 3D sensing modalities with minimal effort and disruption. Cron AI’s accurate, high quality, real-time, robust, and truly sensor agnostic 3D data perception platform aims to make it easier and more compelling for new industries to access the huge value of 3D lidar-point cloud processed data and build applications of the future.
