Initially, the underlying technology that makes enot.ai’s magic happen was built for internal use. Before enot.ai, the company’s founders originally founded Expasoft - a successful AI development house that grew from 0 to 50+ people in only a few years. Oftentimes, Expasoft’s clients had challenging use cases for neural network deployment - either the location sites didn’t have any data coverage; the clients requested near to zero latency, had hardware limitations (cost and size-wise), or had outrageous cloud processing costs. To address this issue, the technology that runs enot.ai today was born.
While continuously improving the technology, the team won 1st place in IEEE’s Global Low-Power Image Recognition Challenge 2019 by outcompeting leading teams from Amazon, Qualcomm and MIT. At that moment the founders decided to create an entirely separate company - enot.ai - with the goal to become a world-leading company in the neural network optimization space.
During the first quarter of 2021, enot.ai started discussions with several VC funds to raise funding. While there were initial discussions with a few VC arms of large tech companies, it was decided that at that stage it was preferable to partner up with a standalone VC firm, as enot.ai’s goal is to build a company that addresses the broader market, independent of a specific partner.
By April 2021, enot.ai had already run pilots with several clients, and that allowed the company to close its first funding round one month later from New Nordic Ventures (newnordic.vc).
We recently asked New Nordic Ventures (NNV), what made them believe in enot.ai in the first place and why they decided to invest. As Dmitry Saikovsky, General Partner of NNV, commented, “Prior to making our investment proposal to enot.ai, we met with the team several times - we wanted to understand whether the founders, who have an exceptional engineering background, also have enough motivation and commitment to build a global company and dominate international markets in their field. We had no doubts that enot.ai had developed outstanding technology - before meeting us they already had several customers, including large international tech companies. That confirmed for us that enot.ai is solving a business-critical issue in the neural network space that cannot be solved internally nor are there any feasible solutions available in the market. Less than six months have passed since we invested in enot.ai, and they have built and launched several products, have a constantly increasing number of international customers, a clear expansion strategy, and an outstanding team. That is good progress and we are happy to support their journey.”
Since closing the round, enot.ai has been able to release a major update to Enot Pro, our state-of-the-art neural network architecture search engine, which now supports quantization, thus providing even higher levels of neural net acceleration; we have built a full integration for Enot Pro with Yolo_v4 and Yolo_v5, and, finally, we have released Enot Lite (an inference engine) that provides up to 3 times acceleration with less than an hour required from the developer. In turn, distribution packages for all of our products have been added to the PyPI package repository. Furthermore, we have managed to close several partnerships and onboard companies in spaces such as Robotics, IoT, Healthcare, Video and Image Analytics, Drones, Mobile Apps and others.
To wrap up 2021, we plan to scale our client reach to the USA (so far we have focused on the European market), onboard several more mid-sized tech companies, and release more updates for our products.
We’d love to talk to you about how we can help you improve your neural network pipeline. Message us here on LinkedIn or leave your contact info on our website – www.enot.ai.
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