alwaysAI today announced the close of a $4M Series A funding round to bring its deep learning computer vision (CV) platform for embedded devices to enterprise developers.  The funding was led by BRV, a leading Silicon Valley venture capital firm, with participation from co-founder and CEO Marty Beard. alwaysAI will use its funding to broaden and commercialize its deep learning CV platform and expand its team.

"Artificial Intelligence is clearly the next major technology wave; and deep learning computer vision, in particular, will unleash a huge array of new enterprise applications and customer value," said Beard. "However, developing and deploying CV is highly complex and currently relegated to academics and specialists. alwaysAI will make it easy and affordable for the enterprise developer."

alwaysAI will provide everyday developers an easy-to-use platform to quickly develop and deploy deep learning CV applications on embedded devices - including cameras, drones, wearables, robots and transportation units. The platform will be available through a simple and affordable subscription service that provides:

• Deep learning CV models: A pre-trained model that developers can select from alwaysAI's model catalogue or they can provide their own.
• A development virtual machine: A software toolkit that provides everything needed to easily build and deploy CV applications across ARM-based devices.
• APIs to build core CV applications: Simple APIs to quickly enable core services like object detection, classification, tracking, counting, facial recognition and more.
• Simple deployment: A deployment process optimized for embedded devices - enabling inference on the edge, untethered from the cloud.

According to the Ericsson Mobility Report, IoT endpoints will reach over 22 billion units by 2024.  The vast majority of these IoT endpoints will be ARM-based units inside a device with a sensor that are ready to autonomously learn and act on the edge. As Tractica's founder and managing director Clint Wheelock says, "Computer vision is an exploding opportunity, with applications spreading rapidly across different enterprise segments like manufacturing, retail, health care, security, agriculture and government."

"We are thrilled to invest in the rapidly emerging world of deep learning computer vision," said BRV co-founder and general partner John Malloy. "We see the tremendous potential in the enterprise and believe Marty and team have the vision, technology and deep enterprise experience to bring this potential to a broad base of developers across a wide variety of industries and applications."