$3 Million Seed Financing Round Secured and Led by Motus Ventures for Commercialization and Deployment

Kelzal, a San Diego-based startup developing novel neural networks and vision sensor technology, today announced its seed financing and commercialization strategy for its new product line — the Ultra-Low Power and Ultra-Fast Perception Appliances™. The vast majority of camera sensors are frame-based. AI engineers pair these cameras with convolutional neural networks to achieve perception solutions that can identify and classify objects such as people and vehicles. This combination requires extremely expensive and power hungry CPUs/GPUs while yielding slow response times - unacceptable for edge intelligence. The Kelzal event-based vision devices combined with third generation neural networks offers fast low power perception - well suited for mobile robots and surveillance applications in remote locations. The company is backed by $3 million of seed financing led by Motus Ventures.

The increasingly sophisticated needs from sensors, driven by the security and monitoring, retail/property surveillance and autonomous vehicle industries, require greater acumen than current commercial offerings are able to provide. Contemporary frame-based computer vision systems rely on inordinate amounts of power and computing capability to process largely unused data, and yet still cannot guarantee the split-second accuracy needed for crucial decision making. Nor can they operate in complex scenarios.

"These are things that are hard to do with current recognition systems," said Olivier Coenen, CTO, Founder & Interim CEO, Kelzal. "Scenes with a lot of similar movement or difficult lighting, and the ability to discern between objects are common hurdles. These challenges are holding back advancements in entire industries."

Kelzal's core technology is an "event-based" sensor that only tracks changes in a scene — all that's needed to assess a situation for critical imaging. The appliances allow for rapid decision making at 100x the frame rate of a camera, while transmitting less data and consuming exponentially less power.

"Accuracy and response times are critical for the AI solutions that are redefining businesses in these industries," said Jim DiSanto, Executive Chairman, Kelzal and Managing Partner, Motus Ventures. "For those applications requiring fast, accurate, and energy efficient visual perception, Kelzal's Perception Appliances will enable true edge intelligence without data center compute power."

As part of this funding, Gioia Messinger, former Founder and CEO of Avaak, Inc. (NYSE: ARLO) inventor of the most popular wirefree battery operated cameras for the Smart Home, joins the Kelzal board of directors and participates daily as an executive consultant.

Kelzal's visual sensors include:

Ultra-FAST Perception Appliance™ — With object recognition and classification capabilities within few milliseconds, fast enough to detect and track a speeding bullet, the Ultra-FAST Perception Appliance™ is ideal for enabling autonomy (e.g. autonomous vehicles and robots).

Ultra-Low Power Perception Appliance™ — Able to run on a single battery with comparable accuracy and speed, the Ultra-Low Power Perception Appliance™ can be used for surveillance, and retail automation and analysis.

Kelzal's commercial development is underway through the support of its $3 million of seed financing led by Motus Ventures, a venture capital fund focused on the intersection of transportation, smart infrastructure and the Internet of Things.

ABOUT KELZAL

Kelzal is a leading developer of third generation neural-network-powered vision sensors for high performance object and activity recognition, at ultra-low power. Onboard AI systems mimic the human brain, processing visual data within milliseconds, in more light conditions than any existing technology. The technology is ideal for use in surveillance, autonomous vehicles and mobile robots. For more information, visit http://www.kelzal.com/

ABOUT MOTUS VENTURES

Motus Ventures is a seed stage venture capital fund and business accelerator focusing on AI, Robotics and IoT across several of the world's largest industries including Transportation, Telecommunications, Commercial Real Estate, Agriculture and Industrial Manufacturing. Motus provides value-added services to help launch new businesses which originate from: university researchers and scientists who have a new promising technology and desire to form a startup company, entrepreneurs in the field who need resources and money, and spin outs from larger transportation related businesses. For more information, visit http://www.motusventures.com

Contacts
Sean Lenehan
Antenna Group for Kelzal
sean@antennagroup.com