DENSO group company NSITEXE Inc., a designer and developer of semiconductor components enabling next-generation automotive applications, has led Quadric’s $21 million Series B funding round. MegaChips also contributed major investment and existing investors Leawood VC, Pear VC, Uncork Capital, and Cota Capital participated in the round.
NSITEXE first invested in Quadric, an innovator in high-performance edge processing, in 2019 to support the startup’s development of edge processing units, a key technology for automated driving. In 2021, NSITEXE and Quadric announced a joint development to create safety solutions for traditional automotive applications, as well as newer ones, such as automated driving, mobility-as-a-service and smart sensors.
“As the AI market matures, businesses are under pressure to accelerate machine learning initiatives and need production-ready, easy-to-deploy AI solutions that don’t require building from the ground up,” said Tony Cannestra, director of Corporate Ventures at DENSO. “Having evaluated Quadric’s q16 processor, its ability to run many types of algorithms efficiently and flexibly allows Quadric’s platform to enable AI in new services and products. We look forward to continuing to work closely with Quadric and plan to integrate their IP into DENSO’s SoC products.”
The Series B investment will help Quadric release the next version of its novel computer architecture, improve its software development kit performance, and roll out IP products for integration in SoCs. Quadric will also expand its team and hire in these key product areas.
“It’s an exciting time to be able to partner with industry powerhouses in semiconductors and AI to bring accelerated computing to the Edge,” said Veerbhan Kheterpal, co-founder and CEO of Quadric. “The market is saturated with rigid accelerators. Our product fills the void with a fully programmable multi-kernel processing architecture.”
DENSO established NSITEXE in 2017 to create next-generation, high-performance semiconductor devices that innovate automotive solutions.
