Eta Compute Series C Gets $12.5 Million

Eta Compute Inc. announced last month it had raised $12.5 million in a Series C round of funding.

The financing round for the Westlake Village technology company was led by Synaptics Inc., along with participation from existing investors. Satish Ganesan, chief strategy officer at Synaptics, will join the Eta Compute board.

Eta Chief Executive Ted Tewksbury said that the company was delighted to welcome Ganesan to the board.

“He brings a wealth of strategic, business and technology experience and we look forward to collaborating with Synaptics to address the multi-billion dollar opportunity in Edge AI,” Tewksbury said in a statement.

Synaptics makes human interface products such as touchpads for laptops and touch and voice technology for smart home devices and smart cars.Eta Compute was founded five years ago and has carved out a space in the machine learning and artificial intelligence sector. Its technology is used in mobile devices and the Internet-of-Things as part of edge computing, or the deployment of data-handling activities at the source of the data capture, such as smartphones, tablets and laptops.

The company said the Series C brings the company’s total funding to $31.9 million.Additionally, Eta also announced a co-development and co-marketing partnership with Synaptics. This collaboration between the companies accelerates the introduction of low power audio- and vision-based edge artificial intelligence products for smart home Internet of Things (IoT) markets and for smart industrial IoT application in buildings, factories and cities.Eta will have access to Synaptics’ low-power Katana Edge AI SoC (system on a chip) product, and Synaptics will access Eta’s Tensai Flow software and neural network compilers.Tewksbury said that partnering with Synaptics for its next generation silicon enables Eta Compute to rapidly and cost-effectively extend its Tensai software into new applications requiring higher performance sound, image and sensor processing.“Combined with our new funding, we will now be able to expand our available market, grow design wins and accelerate the introduction of new modules and software,” Tewksbury said in his statement.