French startup raises €7m in Series A funding

20th February 2019

Lanna Deamer

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Fabless semiconductor start-up designing disruptive ultra-low-power AI embedded processors for battery-operated edge devices, GreenWaves has announced that it has raised €7m in its Series A. The round was co-led by Huami, with the participation of Soitec, its seed round lead investor, and other investors.

“This support from a distinguished group of corporate investors demonstrates the GAP processor family’s unique value proposition within this emerging market,” said Loic Lietar, GreenWaves’ Co-founder and CEO. “We have been one step ahead of the market in identifying and serving this segment that is now widely recognised by the industry.”

GAP8 has a combination of attributes to serve battery-operated AI use cases:

Energy efficiency for machine learning inference computing at power consumption levels compatible with years of battery-powered operation.
Ultra-fast wake up, low stand-by power consumption and dynamically adjustable frequency and voltage to consume energy only when required.
Fully programmable regular RISC-V / PULP parallel architecture to cope with the rapidly evolving in machine learning algorithms.

GAP8 best serves IoT and consumer battery-operated applications including consumer and medical wearables, people and objects counting, machine health monitoring, home surveillance, voice control, face detection and recognition, consumer robotics, autonomous micro-drones, and smart toys.

GAP8 was launched in February 2018 and more than 300 development boards have been sold to date. GAP8 is enjoying strong commercial traction with multiple customer designs in progress.

GreenWaves is one of the very first RISC-V silicon vendors to successfully offer the industry a highly differentiated technical and market positioning to capture RISC-V’s increasingly relevant Instruction Set Architecture.

The funds will also be used to complete the development of GreenWaves’ second generation product which will enable another quantitative and qualitative leap in the capabilities offered by intelligent, battery-powered edge devices.

“We are very pleased to be participating in GreenWaves’ Series A financing round,” said Wang Huang, Huami’s CEO.

“GreenWaves’ GAP8 and strong product roadmap has set the bar for delivering energy efficiency for high performance signal processing and machine learning inference algorithms on edge devices, including wearables. We see a wide range of use cases for GAP8 processor that will transform IoT computing. This investment will also strengthen our portfolio in the RISC-V ecosystem.”

“Soitec is proud to continue its support of GreenWaves’ unique solutions for ultra-low power computing,” said Paul Boudre, Soitec’s CEO. “GreenWaves’ chips, perfectly suited for AI and edge computing, are innovating across a wide range of markets and applications. Our engagement in GreenWaves' development is part of Soitec's long term strategy to play a key role in providing solutions for IoT, AI and mobile markets.”

GreenWaves will be demonstrating GAP8 at Embedded World 2019 at the RISC-V Foundation booth, 3A-536, in Nürnberg, Germany, from 26th-28th February, 2019.