Kneron closes B round at $48m

San Diego – Leading full-stack edge AI company Kneron today announces new series B funding of $48 million led by Horizons Ventures. New investors joining the round include LITEON, a world-leading provider of opto-electronics and power solutions; ADATA, a leading memory compute provider; as well as the family office of a major Taiwanese financial institution which, as a business group, operates subsidiaries that range from real estate development to telecommunications. Through the current round, Kneron’s previous series A2 investor Foxconn also increased their investment amount.

​Albert Liu, founder and CEO of Kneron, says:“We are excited to work our new strategic investors in the advancement of core smart city infrastructures. Edge AI is key to enabling a whole array of devices, from edge servers to smart cameras, which will truly accelerate a proliferation of AI applications that require cross-vertical efforts. With new funding, we are prepared to tape out a next generation of innovative chips.”

​Over the past year, Kneron saw significant new customer wins spanning multiple verticals including smart vehicles, smart homes and smart cities.

​With Hanwha, the global leader in IP cameras, Kneron partnered up to accelerate smart city and smart building management. Kneron’s KL720 enables the Hanwha Techwin X series AI cameras for functions such as virtual fences and human detection.

​As of March, Kneron also presented its solutions at the Foxconn-led Mobility in Harmony (MIH) Consortium for electric vehicles. Kneron displayed its OT8600+KL520 developer board for vehicle camera sensors to deploy people, vehicle and object detection.

​Other new partners teaming up with Kneron to push out products in vehicle, security and broader AIoT use cases include:
​●​Spark, Sens-cam: AI sens-cam for mask detection.
●​SMAX, VS8 for Chunghwa Telecom: A box (edge server) with two KL720 for smart traffic crossroads regulation.
●​TDV, iEdge4: Industrial grade raspberry pi box for parking lot license plate management system.
●​Zhongxin Bus: Blind spot detection.

​Across previous years, Kneron has also established collaborations with customers including the likes of Garmin, Dessmann, Gree, OFILM, AAEON, Advantech, and Quanta.
​Kneron’s newly raised funds brings the company’s total funding to date to over $140 million, following initial Series A funding from financial investors including the likes of Qualcomm, Alibaba, Sequoia as well as strategic investors such as Foxconn and Delta Electronics.