According to the official introduction, after two years of research and development, the chip has high performance and low cost. Its price may be 30% lower than similar products, and the chip can provide better design for third-party suppliers, OEMs and small device manufacturers.
It is reported that Zhou Jun, the former head of Samsung Semiconductor’s China area, jumped to Rokid as vice president in April this year. He once said that due to the technical requirements of smart speakers, general-purpose chips without a neural network processing unit and a digital signal processor are under consideration. It is difficult to be competent, even if it meets the demand for computing power, it will consume too much power and cost, which is not conducive to the promotion of intelligent voice products such as smart speakers.
Dr. Zhou Jun first taught at the Department of Electronic Science and Engineering of Nanjing University after graduating from school. After that, he successively worked at Nanjing Microelectronics, Double Power Technology, Samsung Semiconductor (China), and is a senior semiconductor company.
According to Lei Feng reports, Zhou Jun has said that Rokid AI chip focuses on the field of voice interaction. Its development path is: In the limited capacity, maximize performance, while reducing the price from the perspective of reducing the cost of the supply chain, so as to create competitiveness.
Founded in July 2014, Rokid is headquartered in Hangzhou and has R&D centers in Beijing and San Francisco. It is positioned as an intelligent hardware company focusing on AI human-computer interaction.
Smart Voice is one of the main directions of Rokid. In October 2017, Rokid and Aliyun jointly launched a full-stack voice open platform to provide a one-stop voice solution for the industry; Today, Sonos San Francisco held a new product launch announcement to announce that Rokid is the only one in the world. Chinese voice partner. It is reported that Rokid and Amazon at the same time began to do intelligent voice interactive hardware. Rokid's big hardware product line is the smart speaker Pebble (moonstone).
In addition to the smart speaker Pebble, Rokid also owns the intelligent robot Alien (alien) and AR glasses.
Rokid has won multiple rounds of financing. In August 2014, Rokid received IDG, Linear Capital, Mfund, and Angels Capital’s $8.3 million angel round investment; in October 2015, he won the Walden International Leading Angel Investor’s investment. Tens of millions of dollars in Series A financing; on November 1, 2016, they were awarded by Shangshang Capital, IDG, Mfund, Lansing Capital, Walden International and other institutions with the investment in Series B financing, the amount was not announced, but Rokid officials said that B After the round of financing, the company's valuation reached 450 million U.S. dollars. In January 2018, a new round of financing was completed. The lead investors were Temasek, Credit Suisse, CDIB, and IDG. It was reported that the financing amount was close to 100 million U.S. dollars.