Southfield’s DENSO Leads $21M Funding for AI Solutions

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DENSO company NSITEXE Inc. led a $21 million Series B funding round in edge processing unit company Quadric. // Courtesy of Quadric
DENSO company NSITEXE Inc. led a $21 million Series B funding round in edge processing unit company Quadric. // Courtesy of Quadric

NSITEXE Inc., a company of the DENSO group in Southfield, led a recently closed $21 million Series B funding round for Quadric, an innovator in high-performance edge processing units, a key technology for automated driving.

MegaChips made a large investment in the funding round as well, and returning investors Leawood VC, Pear VC, Uncork Capital, and Cota Capital also contributed.

NSITEXE first invested in Quadric in 2019 to support the startup’s development of edge processing units. 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,” says 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 System-on-a-Chip (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 also will 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,” says 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.

DENSO invests in companies working on technologies that advance mobility services and that align with its causes of achieving carbon neutrality by 2035 and creating a safe and seamless world for all. Over the past five years, DENSO has invested more than $100 million in startups.



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