SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Recogni Inc., designers of a vision-oriented artificial intelligence platform for autonomous vehicles, today announced auto industry veteran Peter Mertens has joined its Board of Directors. As the automotive industry is transitioning to autonomous vehicles, a network of computers is needed to drive these vehicles efficiently on a limited energy budget. While these AI systems are trained offline, they need to process the sensor data in real-time in the vehicle. Today, autonomous vehicles have hit the processing efficiency wall and are unable to transition to Level 3+ autonomy and beyond. Recogni is focused on creating high-performance and low-power AI processing to help make autonomous vehicles a reality.
“I am excited to work with the Recogni team that is solving bottlenecks associated with autonomous driving today,” said Mertens. “This is a great opportunity to achieve higher machine intelligence as autonomous systems are becoming smarter and are driven by more powerful edge processing.”
Mertens has a 35-year career in the automotive industry including senior positions at Mercedes Benz, General Motors and Tata. He was the CTO at Volvo Cars for six years and CTO at Audi AG until November 2018. Mertens has served as a member of the Board of Directors at Polestar SE, Zenuity SE, Audi Sport GmbH, Audi China and Volkswagen Financial Services.
“Peter’s experience and leadership with autonomous vehicles makes him a go-to advisor for our company,” said RK Anand, CEO of Recogni. “Today, these vehicles need datacenter class performance while consuming minuscule amounts of power. Recogni will leverage our expertise in machine learning, computer vision, silicon, embedded software, and system design, to create a fundamentally new system that benefits the auto industry with very high efficiency at the lowest power consumption. We are thrilled to add Peter to our team as we continue to scale our business."
Mertens is joining Recogni during a period of growth for the company as it delivers the most capable inferencing system to enable state of the art sensor fusion of visual and depth sensor data and continues to grow its top-tier engineering team. Recogni is currently in discussions with multiple auto manufacturers to provide them with the full suite of enabling technology from modules to the software.
Founded in 2017 and headquartered in San Jose, Calif., the company has operations in Munich, Germany and is positioning itself to revolutionize perception processing for Level 2+ autonomous vehicles. Using a Vision Cognition Processor, Recogni will solve the endpoint inferencing problem with autonomous vehicles efficiently and change the trajectory of full level 3, 4, and 5 autonomy. The company’s founders possess deep industry experience in system design, AI, vision, and custom silicon design.
In July, the company announced $25 million in Series A financing led by GreatPoint Ventures with participation from Toyota AI Ventures, BMW i Ventures, Faurecia (one of the world’s leading automotive technology companies), Fluxunit (VC arm of lighting and photonics company OSRAM), and DNS Capital.
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About Recogni
Recogni’s mission is to design a vision-oriented artificial intelligence system from the ground up. The system will deliver unprecedented inference performance through novel edge processing, allowing vehicles to see farther and make driving decisions faster than humans while consuming minimal amounts of energy. The company is headquartered in San Jose, Calif. with operations in Munich, Germany and is backed by leading venture capital firms including GreatPoint Ventures with participation from Toyota AI Ventures, BMW i Ventures, Faurecia, Fluxunit - OSRAM Ventures and DNS Capital. For more information, visit www.recogni.com.
