Possible applications include face and voice biometrics

Artificial intelligence (AI) company Deci has announced a $21 million Series A round led by New York-based global private equity and venture capital firm Insight Partners.

The company’s platform uses end-to-end deep learning development to aid companies in building, optimizing, and deploying advanced models for cloud, edge, and mobile applications.

The funding also saw the participation of existing investors Square Peg, Emerge and Jibe Ventures, as well as new investors, including Samsung Next, Vintage Investment Partners, and Fort Ross Ventures.

The fresh funds, which brings the total raised by the company to $30.1 million, will be used to accelerate Deci’s commercial growth by expanding sales, marketing, and customer success operations globally.

“This funding is a vote of confidence in our work to empower enterprises to make deep learning breakthroughs into an everyday 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,” said Deci’s CEO Yonatan Geifman.

According to Deci, its AutoNAC (Automated Neural Architecture Construction) platform enables AI developers to shorten the development lifecycle substantially, delivering up to an 80 percent reduction in cloud computing costs.

“AutoNAC created some of the best classification and detection models ever developed,” explained Ran El-Yaniv, co-founder and chief scientist at Deci.

“But we didn’t stop there; our technology is used for any deep learning task, be it a 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.”

Together with the news of the investment, Deci also announced that 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,” he said.

“We are delighted to be part of Deci’s ScaleUp journey and look forward to supporting the company’s rapid growth,” Jaffe concluded.