Syntiant

Founded in 2017 in Irvine, California, specializing in "Neural Decision Processors" — tiny accelerators that run neural nets on a fraction of a milliwatt. The target is always-on features: wake words in earbuds and phones, sound recognition in sensors, where an ordinary DSP would drain the battery.

By moving the model onto dedicated silicon instead of the main processor, the device can sleep almost completely until it hears the right sound. Backed by Intel, Microsoft and Bosch among others, it has shipped in tens of millions of consumer gadgets — one of the few edge-AI startups to actually reach volume rather than just a demo.