Camera-tech startup Edgetensor secures funding

Early-stage venture capital firm SRI Capital has invested an undisclosed amount in Edgetensor, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup that offers software development kits (SDKs) for cameras including those of smartphones with facial-tracking capabilities.

Bengaluru- and Dallas-headquartered Edgetensor offers Deep Learning-based SDKs that can run on low power off-the-shelf commodity edge devices and can process 30 to 40 frames per second by only sending event-driven information to the cloud, the company says. The SDKs can also be used for human detection and pose tracking, vehicle detection and identification, and licence plate recognition.

Edge computing attempts to do away with the delay associated with cloud computing. An edge device can perform computations locally without sending data to the cloud for processing. Thus, it bypasses cloud roadblocks such as latency, privacy, reliability and safety concerns.

Edgetensor’s solution handles a slew of important functions including face tracking, head-pose tracking and location, gaze direction and location, age and gender, face recognition, face identification/verification, and emotion recognition.

The startup, legally called Edgetensor Technologies Pvt. Ltd, was founded last year by Rajesh Narasimha and Soumitry J Ray, both of whom have obtained their PhDs from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Narasimha and Ray were part of Metaio, a German augmented reality startup acquired by Apple in 2015.

Edgetensor’s solutions have application in in-vehicle monitoring to prevent distracted driving and enhance video security in public places. The solutions also find application in robotics, smart cities, retail, marketing, fintech and healthcare.

SRI Capital, which has offices in Philadelphia and Hyderabad, has so far backed a little more than 30 companies. It mostly invests between $500,000 and $3 million in companies working in optics, hardware, sensors and other technology. The firm also makes selective Series A investments.

The company recently invested an undisclosed amount in another camera technology startup named DreamVu, which claims to have developed a cost-efficient omnidirectional camera platform that helps provide augmented navigation capabilities to autonomous robots. Simply put, the solution can capture 360-degree 3D videos in real time.