EdgeQ, a California-based 5G wireless infrastructure provider, has raised $75 million in a Series B funding round.
The round consists of institutional and strategic investors, including Phaistos Investment Fund, Strategic Development Fund (SDF), the investment arm of the United Arab Emirates Tawazun Council, Singapore-based global investor EDBI (also backed Biofourmis), IRONGREY, ST Engineering, Yaletown, ClearSky, and other existing investors.
To date, the company has raised $120M in funding.
“It is really exciting to see a rich mix of institutional and strategic investors validate the mission and spirit of EdgeQ. We are here to empower and enable new players, new participants, and new providers of 5G connectivity and internet access in simplistic, affordable terms,” said Vinay Ravuri, CEO and co-founder of EdgeQ. “By removing the friction and price premium that traditionally accompanies cellular deployment, we have envisioned a new backbone that is simple, intuitive, and open. And that disruption is available now.”
The company plans to use the newly injected funds to ramp up its 5G + AI “Base Station-on-a-Chip” and develop its next-generation chip.
This latest funding round makes EdgeQ the most well-funded 5G+AI chip startup focusing on wireless infrastructure.
Compacting complex 5G chips
As 5G continues to digitise physical assets, traditional cellular communications infrastructure has not evolved to accommodate the next billion people and trillion devices that will be connected to the network.
Today’s solutions are either proprietary, costly, and slow, or based on general-purpose chips that were not designed for 5G. This creates an opportunity to reconstitute 5G networks in a more nimble and agile form.
EdgeQ’s 5G chip aims to solve these problems by compacting the most complex and core functions of cloud and communications into a single chip the size of a coin.
5G+AI “base station on a chip”
EdgeQ was co-founded by Vinay Ravuri (CEO) in 2018 to democratise 5G networks in simple, intuitive terms that the market can consume and deploy ubiquitously.
The US firm has developed the world’s first 5G+AI “base station on a chip,” giving operators, cloud service providers, and enterprises the revolutionary ability to build, configure, and deploy public and private 5G networks that are simple, scalable, and affordable.
The converged 4G+5G+AI platform is open and software programmable, enabling operators and service providers to deploy systems at scale, implement wholesale upgrades without ripping and replacing their current network configuration, and free the market from vendor lock-in.
Further, the massively integrated 4G+5G+AI chip compacts the equivalent worth of an entire rack of expensive base station equipment into a tiny silicon, running at 50% of the power and cost of traditional approaches.
The enterprise-grade platform comes feature complete, including a production-grade Physical Layer (PHY) software that governs all the essential protocols and features of 4G/5G.
Currently, the company employs around 200 people.
