Nervana Systems was an artificial intelligence software company based in
San Diego, California
San Diego ( , ; ) is a city on the Pacific Ocean coast of Southern California located immediately adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a 2020 population of 1,386,932, it is the eighth most populous city in the United States ...
, and
Palo Alto, California
Palo Alto (; Spanish language, Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a Sequoia sempervirens, coastal redwood tree kno ...
.
The company provided a full-stack software-as-a-service platform called Nervana Cloud that enabled businesses to develop custom
deep learning
Deep learning (also known as deep structured learning) is part of a broader family of machine learning methods based on artificial neural networks with representation learning. Learning can be supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised.
De ...
software. On August 9, 2016, it was acquired by
Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...
, for an estimated $408 million.
Deep learning framework
The company's (now discontinued) open source deep learning framework is calle
neon Neon which the company said would outperform rival frameworks such as Caffe,
Theano
In Greek mythology, Theano (; Ancient Greek: Θεανώ) may refer to the following personages:
*Theano, wife of Metapontus, king of Icaria. Metapontus demanded that she bear him children, or leave the kingdom. She presented the children of Melan ...
,
Torch
A torch is a stick with combustible material at one end, which is ignited and used as a light source. Torches have been used throughout history, and are still used in processions, symbolic and religious events, and in juggling entertainment. In ...
, and
TensorFlow
TensorFlow is a free and open-source software library for machine learning and artificial intelligence. It can be used across a range of tasks but has a particular focus on training and inference of deep neural networks. "It is machine learning ...
– would achieve its performance advantage through assembler-level optimization, multi-GPU support, and use of an algorithm called Winograd for computing
convolutions
In mathematics (in particular, functional analysis), convolution is a mathematical operation on two functions ( and ) that produces a third function (f*g) that expresses how the shape of one is modified by the other. The term ''convolution'' ...
, which are common mathematical operations in the deep learning process.
Nervana Cloud
Nervana Cloud, announced in February 2016, is based on Neon, and ran on
Nvidia
Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...
Titan X GPUs, but Nervana was also developing a custom
application-specific integrated circuit
An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC ) is an integrated circuit (IC) chip customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use, such as a chip designed to run in a digital voice recorder or a high-efficie ...
(ASIC) called the Nervana Engine that was optimized for deep learning and that Nervana said would perform 10x better than
Nvidia
Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...
Maxwell architecture GPUs. The Nervana Engine was expected to achieve greater compute density by implementing only those design elements that are necessary to support deep learning algorithms and ignoring legacy elements specific to graphics processing.
History
Nervana was founded in 2014 by CEO Naveen Rao, CTO Amir Khosrowshahi (
Dara Khosrowshahi
Dara Khosrowshahi ( fa, دارا خسروشاهی, ; born May 28, 1969) is an Iranian-American businessman and the chief executive officer of Uber. Khosrowshahi was previously CEO of Expedia Group, a company that owns several travel fare aggreg ...
's cousin
), and VP Algorithms Arjun Bansal. Nervana has raised $28 million in funding.
In June 2015, Nervana raised $20.5 million in series A funding led by Data Collective with participation from
Allen & Company
Allen & Company LLC is an American privately held boutique investment bank based at 711 Fifth Avenue, New York. The firm specializes in real estate, technology, media and entertainment.
History
Founded in 1922 by Charles Robert Allen, Jr., he w ...
, AME Cloud Ventures,
Playground Global
Playground Global is an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in deep tech and assists startups with software, hardware, machine learning, marketing, talent and design. The company was founded in 2015 by Andy Rubin, Peter Barrett, Matt ...
, the
CME Group
CME Group Inc. (Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Chicago Board of Trade, New York Mercantile Exchange, The Commodity Exchange) is an American global markets company. It is the world's largest financial derivatives exchange, and trades in asset class ...
,
Draper Fisher Jurvetson
Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) is an American venture capital firm focused on investments in enterprise, consumer and disruptive technologies. In January 2019, DFJ Venture, the early-stage team, spun out and formed Threshold Ventures. DFJ Growth ...
, Fuel Capital,
Lux Capital
Lux Capital is a venture capital firm based in New York City. It was founded in 2000, and focuses on investments in emerging technologies.
History
Lux Capital was founded in 2000 by Peter Hébert, Robert Paull and Josh Wolfe. In April 2011, for ...
, and
Omidyar Network
Omidyar Network is a self-styled "philanthropic investment firm," composed of a foundation and an impact investment firm. Established in 2004 by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam, Omidyar Network has committed over $1.5billion to n ...
. It was estimated to have only 48 employees when it was acquired by
Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...
in 2016.
In January 2020, Intel shut down the development of Nervana in favor of its acquisition of Habana Labs.
References
{{reflist
Companies based in San Diego
Companies based in Palo Alto, California
American companies established in 2014
Software companies based in California
2016 mergers and acquisitions
Intel acquisitions
Software companies of the United States