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With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence technology, the world is experiencing an unprecedented revolution in intelligence. However, an increasingly significant problem is emerging – chip shortages. As the core driving force behind AI technology, the shortage of chips not only limits the widespread application of AI technology but also hinders the rapid development of the technology industry to some extent.
Many major companies, including Google, Apple, Microsoft, and others, are expanding their presence in the chip field. Although these efforts have achieved some success, the problem of chip shortages still exists, especially in the field of AI, where the demand for high-performance computing chips is experiencing explosive growth.
In this era, a innovative company called Hailo has emerged. With its advanced algorithm design, unique chip architecture, and efficient production capacity, Hailo not only alleviates the demand pressure for AI chips in the market but also achieves significant improvements in performance and power consumption.
01.
1-Minute Project Overview
1. Project Name: Hailo
2. Establishment Time: 2017
3. Product Introduction:
Hailo focuses on developing high-performance, energy-efficient AI processors, aiming to provide advanced computing solutions for edge computing and autonomous driving applications.
4. Founding Team:
Orad Nazari
One of the co-founders of Hailo, serves as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the company. Before founding Hailo, Orad worked as an engineer in the elite technology department of the Israeli Defense Forces, focusing on high-performance computing and machine learning.
Avi Baum
CTO, Avi Baum previously served as the Chief Technology Officer of Texas Instruments’ Wireless Connectivity division.
5. Financing Situation:
Hailo completed an A-round financing of $12.5 million in 2018 and a B-round financing of $60 million in 2020. In April 2024, Hailo completed a new round of financing of $120 million and launched the Hailo-10, a new powerful AI accelerator. The new financing round was led by existing and new investors, including the Zisapel family, Gil Agmon, Delek Motors, Alfred Akirov, DCLBA, Vasuki, OurCrowd, Talcar, Comasco, Automotive Equipment (AEV), and Poalim Equity. So far, the company has raised over $340 million.
02.
Innovator of Edge AI Technology
Since its establishment in 2017, Hailo has been committed to expanding the boundaries of artificial intelligence technology. As a high-performance AI processor manufacturer, Hailo focuses on developing processors that can run advanced machine learning applications on edge devices.
The founding of Hailo stems from a deep insight into the direction of AI development. AI technology is changing the interaction between humans and machines in unprecedented ways, allowing us to perceive, analyze, and respond to changes in the environment more accurately and in real-time.
At the beginning of Hailo’s establishment, these technologies were mainly limited to data centers due to their high costs, complex hardware support, and high power consumption.
However, these technologies have the potential to enter broader application areas. Realizing this, the Hailo team started developing processors specifically designed for AI tasks on edge devices, which can support applications in various fields such as smart cities, autonomous driving cars, intelligent manufacturing, precision agriculture, and intelligent retail. This makes edge AI more efficient and cost-effective.
Hailo’s technical strength lies in its unique patented chip architecture, which achieves efficient and high-performance AI processing while maintaining low power consumption, small size, and low cost. With such AI chips, Hailo’s customers can integrate AI into a wide range of applications and edge devices, making people’s lives more convenient and efficient while ensuring privacy and security.
The company’s product portfolio includes a range of AI accelerators integrated with edge platforms, which can perform real-time deep learning inference tasks at the edge. In addition, Hailo also provides a range of AI vision processors, which combine the company’s leading AI inference capabilities with advanced computer vision engines to provide unprecedented AI capabilities for smart cameras.
To ensure the usability of AI processors, Hailo has developed a wide range of software tools that have been deployed by hundreds of customers to help them embed machine learning into their innovative products. Hailo’s software platform provides customers with flexibility and scalability, enabling them to quickly develop and deploy AI applications while maintaining control over performance and cost.
03.
Diversified Performance
Hailo’s latest innovative Hailo-10 high-performance GenAI (Generative AI) accelerator has attracted widespread attention in the field of artificial intelligence due to its excellent performance, power efficiency, and usability.
This processor not only provides powerful computing capabilities for applications such as deep learning and machine learning but also demonstrates outstanding potential in various domains such as speech recognition, image recognition, and natural language processing.
It is worth mentioning that the Hailo-10 introduced this time adopts advanced manufacturing processes and unique architectural designs, which can ensure performance while significantly reducing power consumption and heat dissipation issues. In addition, the Hailo-10 supports multiple programming languages and frameworks, facilitating developers to quickly develop and deploy.
Hailo’s diversified and high-performance chips are also the strong capital that supports its $120 million new round of financing:
High-performance computing: Hailo’s AI chips adopt highly parallel computing architectures, which can process multiple data streams simultaneously, greatly improving computing speed and efficiency. This gives the chip a significant advantage in processing large-scale datasets and complex algorithms.
Low power consumption design: By optimizing the internal circuit structure and power management algorithms of the chip, Hailo has successfully reduced the power consumption of the chip, extending the device’s lifespan. This feature makes the chip widely applicable in areas with strict power consumption requirements, such as mobile devices and embedded systems.
Usability: Hailo’s AI chips support multiple mainstream programming languages and frameworks, such as TensorFlow and PyTorch, enabling developers to easily deploy existing algorithms and models on the chip. In addition, the company provides a wealth of development tools and documentation to help developers quickly get started and solve practical problems.
Security: During data processing and transmission, Hailo chips employ advanced encryption technology and secure protocols to ensure the security and privacy of user data. This feature makes the chip widely applicable in fields with high data security requirements, such as finance and healthcare.
04.
Diverse Industry Use Cases
Currently, many companies at home and abroad have applied Hailo chips to their products and achieved good results.
For example, Philips Healthcare, a Dutch health technology company, has introduced Hailo’s AI chips and applied them in the field of medical image analysis. With the powerful computing capabilities of Hailo chips, Concord Intelligent Travel can quickly and accurately identify and analyze medical image data such as CT and MRI, assisting doctors in disease diagnosis. This not only greatly improves the accuracy and efficiency of diagnosis but also reduces the workload of doctors and provides a better medical experience for patients.
Hailo’s chips are also integrated into Tesla’s autonomous driving system, used for real-time perception of the surrounding environment and making intelligent driving decisions. Through Hailo’s chips, Tesla vehicles can more accurately recognize road signs, pedestrians, vehicles, and other obstacles, thereby achieving a safer and more reliable autonomous driving experience.
In addition, the high computing power and low power consumption characteristics of Hailo chips enable autonomous vehicles to process complex road information and sensor data in real-time, achieving precise environmental perception and decision control. This greatly improves the safety and reliability of autonomous driving systems and lays a solid foundation for the future of intelligent transportation.
Hailo’s technology is also applied in security systems, such as the Swedish security company Securitas. Security companies need efficient monitoring systems to protect the property and safety of their clients. Hailo’s AI chips provide excellent image processing and analysis capabilities, enabling surveillance cameras to identify abnormal behavior, potential threats, and intrusion events in real-time. Through Hailo’s chips, Securitas can provide smarter and more efficient security services, helping clients ensure their safety.
05.
The Relationship Between AI and Chips
In the past decade, many breakthroughs in artificial intelligence have been driven by AI chips, from IBM Watson’s historic victory to Lensa’s viral avatar creation, to the popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
At the same time, as generative AI, autonomous driving cars, and robots continue to develop, the AI industry is becoming increasingly complex, and the continuous optimization of AI chip performance has become an irreversible trend in the industry.
Traditional Chips vs. AI Chips
In terms of AI development and deployment, AI chips have advantages over ordinary chips, mainly due to their unique design attributes. These attributes allow AI chips to perform well in performance, power consumption, customization, and scalability, providing strong support for the rapid development and application of AI technology.
AI chips have parallel processing capabilities
The most prominent difference between AI chips and traditional chips is their computing methods. Traditional chips use sequential processing, completing one calculation at a time, while AI chips utilize parallel processing, executing multiple calculations simultaneously. This method means that large complex problems can be decomposed into smaller ones and solved simultaneously, resulting in faster and more efficient processing.
AI chips are more energy-efficient
Some AI chips employ techniques such as low-precision arithmetic, enabling them to perform calculations with fewer transistors, thereby reducing energy consumption. And due to their proficiency in parallel processing, AI chips can allocate workloads more efficiently than other chips, minimizing energy consumption. In the long run, this may help reduce the large carbon footprint of the AI industry, especially in data centers.
AI chips produce more accurate results
Since AI chips are specifically designed for artificial intelligence, they often perform AI-related tasks such as image recognition and natural language processing more accurately than ordinary chips. Their purpose is to precisely execute the complex calculations involved in AI algorithms, reducing the possibility of errors. This makes AI chips an obvious choice for more high-risk AI applications, such as medical imaging and autonomous driving, where fast accuracy is essential.
AI chips are customizable
Unlike traditional chips, some AI chips (such as FPGAs and ASICs) can be customized to meet the requirements of specific AI models or applications, allowing the hardware to adapt to different tasks. Customization includes fine-tuning certain parameters and optimizing chip architectures for specific AI workloads. This flexibility is crucial for the development of artificial intelligence as it allows developers to customize hardware according to their unique needs, adapting to changes in algorithms, data types, and computational requirements.
06.
Future Deployment of Hailo
As an AI chip manufacturer, Hailo’s core advantage lies in its ability to achieve data center-level performance AI processing on edge devices. The company may continue to strengthen its investment in edge computing and launch more AI chip products with high performance, low power consumption, and low cost to meet the needs of different industries and application scenarios.
With the rapid development of generative AI and the increasing infusion of financing, the demand for advanced chips is constantly increasing. Hailo may continue to increase its research and development efforts in the field of generative AI and launch more chip products suitable for this field, such as AI chips that support large language models (LLMs) for chatbot services, to meet the market’s demand for high-performance data processing.
In addition, Hailo may further expand its global sales network and work with more partners to promote the application and development of AI technology. By collaborating with partners in different industries, Hailo can apply its AI chip technology to more fields such as automotive, security, industrial, and retail, further expanding its market share and influence.
Reference Links:
1. https://hailo.ai/
2. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-02/hailo-raises-120-million-to-design-more-efficient-ai-chips?srnd=tech
3. https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/02/hailo-ai-chip-startup-lands-120m-to-battle-nvidia/
