Today, we welcome Akridata, an Edge data platform company for data-centric AI, to our portfolio. We are delighted to join Accel Partners, Telesoft Partners and others in the company’s $15M Series A financing round.
Computer Vision has been a key focus area for our fund. Several of our investments address opportunities around computer vision and video data. TwentyBN (acquired by Qualcomm) built a real-time edge solution for video understanding. Our Robotics investments, Agility Robotics and Ati Motors have cameras and LIDARs at the core of their product. Analog Inference and their ultra low power AI processor focuses on Video AI workloads at the edge.
Unstructured data like video, LIDAR and other sensor data are huge in size and mostly get created at the Edge. From autonomous vehicles to Robots to security cameras to retail automation systems, terabytes of video and unstructured data are generated every day at the edge. It is slow, expensive and laborious to carry all this data to a central cloud for processing. In a data centric deep learning AI world that is constantly evolving, having quick access to the right dataset is paramount. There is a soaring need for a sophisticated edge-to-core platform to ingest, manage, understand, search and track video data to efficiently deploy deep learning AI models. We have been looking at a solution that will address this area of computer vision.
Enter Akridata – I have known Kumar Ganapathy and Vijay Karamcheti, founders of Akridata, for several years. They are seasoned serial entrepreneurs having built successful companies like VxTel and Virident. At Akridata, they have been approaching this Edge video data problem in a methodical and exhaustive fashion. They have built a product that will deliver an end-to-end solution for customers struggling to manage and utilize rich Edge data.
Vijay and the tech team have built an enterprise hardened product using groundbreaking mathematical models and statistical techniques to understand, interpret and analyze video data. As a deep tech fund, we look for companies with proprietary, hard to replicate technology that drives their competitive advantage. What Akridata has built so far is impressive and hard to replicate. Their traction with blue-chip customers validates the effectiveness of the solution.
It is great to do this investment along with Dinesh Katiyar at Accel and Arjun Gupta at Telesoft Partners. Both are experienced investors with a long track record of supporting founders to build big companies. Fun fact – my very first investment ever as a Venture investor was with Arjun at Validity Sensors, all the way back in 2006 – so I am looking forward to working with Arjun at a board again.
Explosion of Computer vision and video / unstructured data is only getting started. As automation and autonomy get deployed across multiple verticals, Akridata’s product will become integral to the success of AI teams in the enterprise. We look forward to helping Akridata build a category creating product in Edge Data management for a data centric AI world.
Welcome to MFV Portfolio, Akridata!