AI training firm Edgify has secured $6.5m (£4.98m) in a seed funding round backed by Octopus Ventures, Mangrove Capital Partners and a semiconductor giant.
London-based Edgify’s tech enables connected devices to interpret data and train AI locally, before sharing the learnings across an entire network of similar devices.
This framework can train AI on a network of these ‘edge’ devices ranging from MRI machines, connected cars, checkout lanes, mobile devices and anything other device that has a CPU, GPU or NPU.
The firm said the technique means the accuracy of an AI model trained on an Edgify Framework is averaged at 99.98% and never decreases.
Edgify has started deploying the framework within the retail sector initially following a successful proof-of-concept partnership with some of the world’s leading checkout manufacturers and grocery retailers.
Through the tech, self-checkout machines are able to distinguish between barcodeless groceries before sharing the acquired knowledge or model across a distributed yet collaborative framework of point of sale machines.
In addition to the retail industry, Edgify is also in the process of deploying its Framework for the Medical and for the Automotive industries. Using the Edgify Framework to train AI models for pathologies in chest X Rays for medical, and to identify spare parts in the automotive industry. ENDS
The unnamed semiconductor investor, which is itself using the technology, said: “Our Investment in Edgify is of a strategic nature that is by embedding their framework on our chipset we will be able to enable our customers to reduce their data communication and storage costs. We feel Edgify’s Federated Learning framework is industry leading and we look forward to our active collaboration”
Ofri Ben-Porat, CEO and co-founder of Edgify added: “Edgify allows companies, from any industry, to train complete deep learning and machine learning models, directly on their own edge devices. This mitigates the need for any data transfer to the Cloud and also grants them close to perfect accuracy every time, and without the need to retrain centrally.”
Nadav Israel, co-founder and CTO of Edgify, added: “The potential is enormous due to the volume of data each company generates, most of which is rendered redundant due to the processing power required to upload, interpret and analyse it in the Cloud. Edgify’s technology allows businesses to train on the entirety of their data, promising accuracy levels never achieved before.”
AI