Synthara targets breakthrough edge-AI chips with support from a global coalition of investors and R&D partners

Zug, Switzerland -- December 14, 2020 -- Synthara AG, a spin-off from the UZH-ETH Institute of Neuroinformatics (INI) in Zurich, has secured seed funding and research partnerships to develop the next generation of adaptive AI processors for edge applications.

“Edge-AI chips are a specialized and rapidly growing multi-billion dollar market,” said Manu V. Nair, Founder and CEO. “Our algorithm-aware chips are designed to deliver up to 500 times better performance for the next generation of smart sensor applications that use inertial measurement units, audio and image sensors.”

"We are building Synthara on top of years of ground-breaking research at INI. Our solution integrates, for the first time, sparsity-aware processing with in-memory computation,” added Alessandro Aimar, Founder and CTO. "Our product development efforts are supported by a number of partners, including CSEM, a research and technology organization, and Multicoreware. Given our strong ecosystem, we are excited about creating fit-for-purpose AI chip solutions together with our early adopter clients."

“We are delighted to collaborate with Kreskado and support Synthara in their quest to become a global leader in AI chip solutions,” said Dr. Olaf Joeressen, Investment Manager at High-Tech Gründerfonds. “Having validated their technology with our industry and research partners, we expect them to emerge as a strong contender in the vibrant AI-on-the-edge startup ecosystem.”

“I regard edge-AI chips as a key building block to enable the next generation Augmented Reality systems for the mass market,” emphasized Alexander Ilic, former head of Magic Leap Switzerland and Co-founder of the ETH AI Center. “I am excited to back Manu and Ale, a highly talented founding team, in developing this unique technology rooted in the European ecosystem.”

“Synthara’s IP has breakthrough potential and the founders have carefully assembled a powerful ecosystem of investors, advisors and research partners,” said AGK Karunakaran, President and CEO at MulticoreWare Inc. “I am excited to team up with Kreskado to kick this off as a collaboration pilot across the Swiss and Silicon Valley ecosystems.”

“Alongside HTGF, MulticoreWare and Alex, we are thrilled to welcome Zürcher Kantonalbank, University of Zürich, Kumar Ganapathy, Peter Gleissner, Iulia-Alexandra Lungu, Scott Mason, Ali Pourkeramati, Balz Roth and Sankalp Saxena to our board and shareholder ecosystem,” said Sandeep Raju, Founding Chairman at Synthara and Kreskado, a private venture development studio in Switzerland. “We deeply value the tremendous technology product management, company building, and investment lifecycle experience they bring to us and are thrilled to be building Synthara with their participation.”

Synthara is expanding rapidly and is on track to create double-digit high-tech jobs in Switzerland and Germany. It is supported by the Swiss Innovation Agency, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the European Space Agency BIC Switzerland, the European Union Horizon 2020 program, Venturelab, and the IMD Business School. The board and investors are thankful for support from LEXR AG as startup-friendly legal advisors on the transaction.

About Synthara

Synthara is a semiconductor AI company working on a new breed of edge-AI chips that eliminate the trade- off between performance and energy efficiency. Its technology is a result of years of interdisciplinary R&D in system architecture, neuroscience and neural networks at the Institute of Neuroinformatics (University of Zürich and ETH Zürich). Synthara's designs are hand-crafted for smart sensor applications whose computational workload is highly dynamic, such as wearables, IoT, and monitoring. The company has concluded an oversubscribed seed funding round and rallied a team of ambitious engineers, investors and ecosystem partners with deep roots in the industry. Synthara’s early adopter program is already seeing interest from a number of market leaders towards a first set of products in 2022.