Blaize announces $71m Series D financing

Blaize, the AI computing innovator looking to revolutionise edge and automotive computing solutions, has closed a $71m Series D round of funding.

According to JP Scandalios, senior vice president and portfolio manager, Franklin Templeton, a new investor, ““Blaize has demonstrated the capability to enable value creation for organisations tapping the power of AI for edge computing. Automotive, and numerous edge AI markets, such as retail and metro, hold tremendous potential for Blaize to expand on their early market position as the adoption of AI at the edge accelerates, creating a new wave of industrial systems.”

“Blaize System on Chip (“SoCs”) for automotive edge and central compute functions are accelerating electric vehicles and future architectural ambitions of automotive OEMs,” added Tony Cannestra, Director of Corporate Ventures, DENSO, another key investor. “With substantial power advantages making EVs more efficient and economical, Blaize SoCs offer best in class performance with lower power across in-cabin, out of vehicle, and autonomous operations, enabling a streamlined architectural evolution to centralize compute.”

According to Blaize the new funding will support acceleration of the product roadmap to meet growing demand for higher performance, lower power, lower cost AI hardware and transformational AI software solutions in automotive, smart retail, smart city and industrial markets.

In 2020, Blaize successfully released and built a multi-year pipeline for the first generation Blaize AI edge computing hardware products based on the groundbreaking Blaize GSP architecture, and the Blaize AI Studio end-to-end application lifecycle software platform.

“We are pleased with the participation of new and existing premier investors in the Series D round,” said Dinakar Munagala, CEO, Blaize, “We are well positioned to accelerate our next generation products and sustain our lead in delivering integrated hardware and software offerings that enable true value creation for our customers.”