Former NASA chief Golden’s KnuEdge emerges from stealth to target human-machine interaction
San Diego, CA. After a decade of under-the-radar research and development with private funding totaling $100 million, Dan Goldin, the innovator who led the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) throughout its renaissance in the 1990s, yesterday announced the launch of KnuEdge Inc., a fundamentally groundbreaking neural-technology innovation company. It has already achieved $20 million in revenue and is actively engaged with elite hyperscale computing companies and Fortune 500 firms in the aerospace, banking, healthcare, hospitality, and insurance industries.
“We are not about incremental technology. Our mission is fundamental transformation,” said Goldin, founder and CEO of KnuEdge. “We were swinging for the fences from the very beginning, with intent to create technologies that will in essence alter how humans interact with machines, and enable next-generation computing capabilities ranging from signal processing to machine learning.”
In conjunction with its launch from stealth, KnuEdge yesterday unveiled KnuVerse, delivering proven military-grade voice recognition and authentication technology that unlocks the potential of voice interfaces to power next-generation computing. While the voice technology market has exploded over the past five years due to the introductions of Siri, Cortana, and Alexa, the aspirations of most commercial voice technology teams are still on the drawing board because of security and noise issues.
KnuVerse solutions are based on patented authentication techniques using the human voice—even in extremely noisy environments—opening the door for unprecedented innovation for enterprises in industries such as banking, entertainment, and hospitality. It is now possible to authenticate to computers, web/mobile apps, and IoT devices with only a few words spoken into a microphone—in any language, no matter how many other people are talking nearby.
In addition to its voice technology solutions, KnuEdge introduced KNUPATH LambaFabric, which will accelerate neural computing through an entirely different architecture than the GPUs, CPUs, and FPGAs currently on the market. LambdaFabric is inherently designed to scale up to 512,000 devices and beyond in the most demanding computing environments. It has rack-to-rack latency of only 400 ns and first-generation low-wattage 256-core processors. While all other neural computing technology on the market today is built on architectures that have not fundamentally changed in many years, KNUPATH is completely new, based on neurobiological principles, and will reset the standard for chip/system-level compute in data centers and IoT devices.
“KnuEdge is emerging out of stealth mode to aim its new voice and machine-learning technologies at key challenges in IoT, cloud based machine learning, and pattern recognition,” said Paul Teich, principal analyst at Tirias Research. “Dan Goldin used his experience in transforming technology to charter KnuEdge with a bold idea, with the patience of longer development timelines and away from typical startup hype and practices. The result is a new and cutting-edge path for neural computing acceleration. There is also a refreshing surprise element to KnuEdge announcing a relevant new architecture that is ready to ship—not just a concept or early prototype.”
Goldin’s accomplishments read like a Harvard Business Review case study in successful execution. For instance, as NASA chief he guided the redesign and delivered the International Space Station, initiated bold robotic exploration of Mars, and formed the Astrobiology Institute to better understand the origin, evolution, and destiny of life in the universe. In addition, he put a record number of people into space without incident, all while reducing the agency’s planned budget by 33%.
Goldin began his career at NASA in 1962. He became part of a special development team focused on a revolutionary new technology to propel astronauts to Mars and robotic spacecraft to asteroids, comets and the outer edge of the solar system at speeds three to five times faster than the traditional propulsion systems. The concept was considered too radical at the time.
Goldin spent the next 25 years at TRW Corp. where in 1976 he led the development of the core technology that helped prove the economic feasibility of our current satellite television services. In 1992, when Goldin returned to NASA as its chief, he revived the electric propulsion technology he had worked on at NASA 26 years prior. As a result, multiple missions were flown taking advantage of electric propulsion, returning to Earth the first-ever comet dust samples and deep scientific knowledge of space—including an asteroid containing more freshwater than earth. At NASA he also oversaw the development, launch and operation of the Chandrasekhar Advanced X-Ray Telescope, which utilized the grazing incidence X-ray mirror technology that was previously developed under his direction at TRW.
When Goldin decided to start KnuEdge in 2005, he chose to buck traditional startup venture practices. First, he organized a group of private investors who were willing to forgo a typical, incremental technology development phase of one to three years for a much longer time horizon that would enable truly breakthrough inventions. Second, he stayed away from building large teams and high cash burn rates, and instead bootstrapped very small polyglot teams—a formula that was a secret to his success at NASA and TRW.
“We have collaborated with KnuEdge from the beginning of Dan Goldin’s vision to develop an innovative processor which dramatically pushes the performance envelope for machine learning and artificial intelligence,” said Larry Smarr, director, California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). “Our UC San Diego team is very impressed with the LambdaFabric processor’s revolutionary design, which delivers unprecedented levels of performance and scalability. We plan to incorporate KnuEdge solutions into Calit2’s Pattern Recognition Laboratory as we jointly push the boundaries of Big Data analytics.”