- Acquisition complements Qualcomm’s strategic approach to IoT transformation, enhances developer enablement and expands leadership in AI capabilities for IoT
- Edge Impulse’s end-to-end edge AI platform enables over 170,000 developers to create, deploy, and monitor AI models on a wide array of edge devices
Qualcomm Technologies has entered into an agreement to acquire Edge Impulse, seeking to enhance its offering for developers and expand its leadership in artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to power AI-enabled products and services across IoT.
This acquisition is anticipated to complement Qualcomm Technologies’ strategic approach to IoT transformation, which includes a comprehensive chipset roadmap, unified software architecture, a suite of services, developer resources, ecosystem partners, comprehensive solutions, and IoT blueprints to address diverse industry needs and challenges.
Edge Impulse’s end-to-end edge AI platform enables over 170,000 developers to easily create, deploy, and monitor AI models on a wide array of edge devices—with support for varied microcontrollers and processors featuring AI accelerators from multiple semiconductor providers.
Qualcomm’s View
Nakul Duggal, Qualcomm’s group general manager, automotive, industrial and embedded IoT, and cloud computing, said the acquisition an opportunity to significantly enhance their IoT offerings with Edge Impulse’s technology.
“That will complement our strategic approach to IoT transformation,” said Duggal in a statement. “We anticipate that this acquisition will strengthen our leadership in AI and developer enablement, enhancing our ability to provide comprehensive technology for critical sectors such as retail, security, energy and utilities, supply chain management, and asset management.
Strategic Approach to IoT
Widespread adoption of AI in IoT solutions is driven by the ability to augment or automate workflows through rapid data collection, AI-enabled analysis, and enhanced decision-making, allowing enterprises to benefit from improved operational flexibility and efficiency. Qualcomm Technologies is poised to capitalize on this trend through its leading position in enabling industrial transformation with IoT and edge AI technology leadership, according to company officials.
Since last year, Qualcomm Technologies has adapted its strategy to meet the requirements of various IoT segments providing integrated solutions that combine services, software, and hardware, designed to scale across multiple verticals, including consumer, security, healthcare, retail, energy, and enterprise.
The components of Qualcomm’s approach to IoT includes comprehensive chipset roadmap; unified software architecture; cloud services and software-as-a-service capabilities to facilitate commercialization and expand the capabilities of industrial and embedded applications; hardware and software development kits to support IoT developers; purpose-built offerings developed in collaboration with industrial and enterprise customers; and IoT blueprints, featuring a curated set of technologies, ecosystem partners and solutions to address the needs of multiple industries.
Why Edge Impulse
Edge’s development platform includes a comprehensive set of tools and features for data collection and preparation, model training, deployment and monitoring—all with an easy-to-use, user-friendly interface requiring little or no code at all.
Developers can utilize the platform to build solutions for a wide range of applications such as asset tracking and monitoring, manufacturing, anomaly detection, and predictive maintenance systems—using various AI capabilities including computer vision, time-series data, audio events and speech recognition.
Said Qualcomm’s Duggal, “IoT opens the door for a myriad of opportunities, and success is about building real-world solutions, enabling developers and enterprises with AI capabilities to extract intelligence from data, and providing them with the tools to build the applications and services that will power the digital transformation of industries.”