Israeli deep learning development startup Deci raises $21m to accelerate commercial growth

Deci, the deep learning development company that helps enterprises build, optimize, and deploy AI to production, announced it has raised a $21 million Series A round led by New York-based global private equity and venture capital firm Insight Partners. 

Deci's existing investors Square Peg, Emerge and Jibe Ventures participated in the round and were joined by new investors including Samsung Next, Vintage Investment Partners, and Fort Ross Ventures. The investment comes 12 months after Deci secured more than $9 million in seed funding and brings the total funding to $30.1 million. The funds will be used to accelerate Deci's commercial growth by expanding sales, marketing, and customer success operations globally.

Deep learning-powered advancements in AI have led to innovations that have the potential to revolutionize enterprises across industries such as medicine, manufacturing, transportation, communication, and retail. But prolonged development cycles, high computing costs, and impracticality of deployment are major roadblocks in the path to productizing AI.

With Deci's end-to-end deep learning development platform, AI developers can build, optimize, and deploy the most advanced state-of-the-art models to any environment including cloud, edge, and mobile, allowing them to revolutionize industries with innovative products. Deci's platform enables AI developers to shorten the development lifecycle and achieve unparalleled accuracy and runtime performance, resulting in up to an 80% reduction in cloud compute costs.

Yonatan Geifman, CEO and Co-founder, Deci: "Amidst an increase in the adoption of deep learning models, shortening time to market and increasing the success rate in production is becoming critical as more and more enterprises look to commercialize their deep learning-based solutions. Deci's end-to-end deep learning development platform has a proven track record of empowering the world's leading AI teams with the tools they need to create, optimize and successfully deploy innovative AI solutions. This funding is a vote of confidence in our work to empower enterprises to make deep learning breakthroughs into an every-day reality and we are delighted to be leveraging the support and experience of Insight Partners, as well as our other outstanding investors, on this journey."

Deci's deep learning development platform is powered by Deci's proprietary AutoNAC (Automated Neural Architecture Construction) technology, an algorithmic optimization engine that automatically generates best-in-class deep learning models for any task, data set and target inference hardware. AutoNAC recently discovered DeciNets, a family of industry-leading computer vision models that have set a new efficient frontier utilizing only a fraction of the compute power used by the Google-scale Neural Architecture Search (NAS) technologies, the latter having been used to uncover well-known and powerful neural architectures like EfficientNet.

Ran El-Yaniv, Co-founder and Chief Scientist, Deci: "AutoNAC created some of the best classification and detection models ever developed. But we didn't stop there; our technology is used for any deep learning task, be it vision or Natural Language Processing (NLP). Due to the fierce deep learning race to produce more powerful neural networks, AutoNAC is continuously improved so that Deci's customers will always receive the strongest models."

Following the investment, Lonne Jaffe, Managing Director at Insight Partners, will join the Board of Directors at Deci. "Deci is at the forefront of AI and deep learning acceleration, with highly differentiated technology that lets customers optimize blazingly fast deep learning models for inference tuned to any hardware platform," said Jaffe. "We are delighted to be part of Deci's ScaleUp journey and look forward to supporting the company's rapid growth."

The announcement follows significant notable milestones for Deci such as a collaboration with Intel at MLPerf, where on several popular Intel CPUs, Deci's AutoNAC accelerated the inference speed of the well-known ResNet-50 neural network.  Following this, Deci announced a broad strategic collaboration with Intel Corporation to optimize deep learning inference on Intel Architecture (IA) CPUs. In addition to Intel, many more major enterprise companies and Fortune 500 companies have adopted Deci's platform.

Deci was named by Gartner as a Tech Innovator for Edge AI, and was also included in the 2021 CB Insights AI 100 List as a top deep learning accelerator and Wired's hottest startups of 2021 list.

www.deci.ai