Ambarella to acquire Oculii for $307m

Ambarella, an AI vision silicon company, is set to acquire the Ohio-based Oculii Corporation.

Oculii is a developer of adaptive AI software algorithms that designed to enable radar perception using current production radar chips to achieve significantly higher (up to 100X) resolution, longer range and greater accuracy.

These improvements eliminate the need for specialised high-resolution radar chips, which have significantly higher power consumption and cost than conventional radar solutions. Oculii’s software can be deployed on Ambarella’s existing CVflow SoCs, operating in conjunction with radar RF solutions to increase both safety and reliability.

According to Ambarella, the acquisition will help to expand the addressable market for its existing edge AI CV perception SoCs for automotive and other IoT endpoint applications, including mobile robotics and security. The combination of Ambarella’s camera technology and Oculii’s radar software stack will provide an all-weather, low-cost and scalable perception solution, enabling higher levels of autonomy for automotive tier 1s and OEMs.

“The Oculii team brings great synergies with Ambarella’s algorithm-first approach and our ongoing initiatives to intelligently fuse sensor data in edge AI systems,” said Fermi Wang, president and CEO of Ambarella. “We expect Oculii’s adaptive radar perception algorithms, combined with Ambarella’s vision and AI processing, to unlock greater levels of perception accuracy than previously attainable with discrete camera and radar solutions.”

To date, Oculii has engaged with 10 of the top 15 tier 1s on software licensing, and has commercial development contracts with leading OEM and AV companies.

The resolution and sensitivity of its solution is seen as helping to unlock the potential of everything from advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicles to robotics and security, by providing radar with a dynamic waveform that uses AI to learn from and adapt to the environment. The result is an extended operating range of up to 400 meters with a wide field of view.