Continental acquires minority stake in AI vision specialist Recogni

Continental is further expanding its non-tyre activities through the acquisition of a minority stake in German-US start-up Recogni. The investment took place as part of the US$48.9 million Series B financing round announced by Recogni on 17 February. Both companies have agreed not to disclose the amount of the holding.

Recogni is working on a new chip architecture for object recognition in real time based on artificial intelligence (AI), and Continental sees a use for these in its vehicle computers, where they will rapidly process sensor data for automated and autonomous driving.

“Continental has a strong focus on developing automated and autonomous vehicle technologies. Therefore, investing in Recogni perfectly supports our high-performance computing strategy for autonomous vehicle functions,” says Rouven Spinner, investment partner at Continental. “Our shared focus and complementary expertise enable us to see the value of Recogni’s vision cognition technology. We are excited to work with the Recogni team on next-generation perception technologies.”

As a strategic investor, Continental is contributing both financial commitment as well as its expertise in the field of AI, vehicle sensors and advanced driver assistance systems to further the development of the chip design. Continental predicts that volume production featuring the new chip application could begin as early as 2026.

No autonomous driving without faster chips

Figuratively speaking, the new, highly specialised processors serve as an ultra-economical data booster: With minimal energy consumption, they enable vehicle computers to gain a rapid sense of the vehicle’s immediate surroundings, thereby creating the basis for automated and autonomous driving.

“Without faster chips, there will be no networking, no automation and no autonomous driving,” emphasises Frank Petznick, head of Continental’s Advanced Driver Assistance Systems business unit. “Through our own research in the area of new chip designs, our strategic partnerships with large chip manufacturers such as NVIDIA and our investment in Recogni, we are taking the first step toward meeting the future need for highly specialised processors for sensor modules and control units for our powerful, high-performance vehicle computers.”

“Continental’s support is a strong endorsement of Recogni’s approach to solving the most difficult challenges in autonomous driving,” adds R K Anand, Recogni’s chief executive officer. “Recogni’s focus enables us to solve challenge of perception processing by building the world’s highest performing AI inference system at the lowest energy consumption, by developing cutting-edge ASICs for state-of-the-art inference algorithms.”

Growing need for computing power in cars

The need for processors optimised for the specific requirements of AI is growing. Whereas just a few megabytes of sensor data per second had to be analysed a couple of years ago, that figure will increase to several gigabytes per second in the coming years. And while a lane departure warning system used to require just a simple black-and-white camera, the autonomous vehicles of the future will in some cases use more than 20 high-resolution vehicle-surroundings sensors such as radar, camera and lidar simultaneously.

Collaboration through co-pace

Continental’s own start-up organisation, co-pace, initiated the collaboration with Recogni. They have been working together closely over the past 18 months to ensure the greatest possible technical feasibility and, above all, the theoretical efficiency of the new chip design. “While everything is still theoretical, our simulations show that we can expect exponentially faster analysis of our sensor data once we begin to use the Recogni chips,” explains Annika Ratte-Front, head of AI at Continental’s ADAS business unit.