Peak’s Series B: Decisions, Decisions & Recogni’s Series B: Can you just drive?

Peak’s Series B: Decisions, Decisions

Decisions are exhausting. Sure, deciding whether or not to eat a banana for breakfast in the morning is fine. But deciding whether to eat that banana at 6 o’clock after 8 “Do I get up and fill my glass of water” battles, 5 “What do I wear today” wars, and 3 “How are there more dishes I have to clean” internal conflicts, you’re Rocky v Apollo in the 15th.

Solution? Make less decisions. But we can’t all be Mark Zuckerberg in Brunello Cucinelli tees all day, everyday.

Enter, Peak. Peak is the latest AI platform to be backed by VCs. The startup just got $21M in Series B funding led by Oxx, bringing total funding to date to $43M.

Peak’s software gives companies the power to embed AI into the core of their decision making and operations (and it says go ahead, have that banana). This ranges from improving delivery effectiveness, predicting demand, enhancing online shopping experiences, and reducing carbon footprint.

CODI, or Connected Decision Intelligence system, sits between your other systems unlocking the power of a company’s data, acting as a layer of intelligence. Think we could all use one of those.

Ultimately, it’s a three step process. Combine data sources, enrich that data with AI, and then act on the new predictive data. So, yes, while you still have to make a decision off that data, it’s an easier decision. A morning banana-type decision.

Peak’s latest funding will fuel an ambitious global expansion to meet increasing demand. New offices will be coming to the US and India with over 130 new jobs, as they look to shoot past their doubling revenues in the past 12 months and hit a new peak.

Recogni’s Series B: Can you just drive?

You drive. I don’t wanna drive. Bickering everyone has found themselves in the midst of. Oh, autonomous vehicles where are you to save us from this hell?

Hopefully, right around the hairpin turn. With Recogni’s latest Series B funding round of $48.9M, the startup has almost $74M in funding to date to help us rid this argument off Earth.

The San Jose, CA based team is developing an AI vision cognition system for autonomous vehicles.

RK Anand, CEO, “believes self-driving cars have a massive compute problem. While the AI models that guide the cars’ decision-making have powerful servers at their disposal for training, inferencing — the stage at which the algorithms make predictions — must be performed offline to ensure redundancy. But even fully trained models require powerful (and power-hungry) in-car PCs for real-time processing, a paradigm Anand and company believe is unsustainable.”

The nitty gritty of it is Recogni’s chip can capture and analyze up to three uncompressed 8–12 MP streams at 60 frames per second, achieving 70% compute efficiency in typical vision applications.

Hot water! Well, let’s see what it boils down to. All the technical talk is their fancy way of saying Recogni outclasses the competitors in things like image classification (hey that’s a stoplight there), object detection (oh god, car, break), action anticipation (that idiot is going to cut me off), and depth interference (how far away is that idiot).

Using its new funding, Recogni will work to bring its product to market. Initially, the AI-driven company will look to place these systems in level 2 autonomous vehicles, those which have advanced driver assistance systems employed in them. That will progress to levels 3 and 4 before it can ever hit the crème de la crème. A competitive race with the likes of Tesla and Nvidia, eventually someone has to cross the finish line and the put the power to snooze and drive in our hands.