GreenWaves Technologies announces a €20M financing

GreenWaves, the French pioneer in RISC-V application processors for battery powered devices and a performance leader in AI and DSP, announces a 20 million euros financing led by Innovacom together with Thales, Definvest^[1]  and the French Tech Seed Fund^[2], with the backing of historical shareholders Soitec and Zepp Health and other financings.

GreenWaves will use the funding to ramp up the production of its GAP9 processor which is enjoying significant market traction with tier one hearables vendors. GAP9 allows them to bring to market new-to-world audio features such as Neural Network based Noise Filtering and Adaptive Transparency. GAP9 is also being designed into battery powered IoT products such as smart cameras, condition monitoring sensors and vital sign monitoring devices.

Additionally, the funding will support the development of GreenWaves’ next generation processor to further enrich the features, and extend the battery life and programmability of the next generation of earbuds and to enable new automotive applications.

“We are delighted about the rate of customers adoption of GAP9, with a dozen design wins in hearables and IoT. Hearables is on its way to surpass smartphones in innovation and volume”, said Loic Lietar, CEO of GreenWaves Technologies. “In IoT applications we serve the most demanding low power smart camera use cases, where GAP9 shines”.

GAP9 provides the ideal platform for companies requiring a combination of neural network, classic and ultra-low latency Digital Signal Processing capabilities in highly energy constrained products. GAP9 enables these applications while remaining highly flexible and easy to program. GAP9 delivers the lowest energy consumption across all of the tests in the MLPerf™ Tiny v1.0 inference benchmark.

For Sébastien Lecornu, Minister for the Armed Forces, “It is with great satisfaction that the Ministry for the Armed Forces is supporting GreenWaves Technologies, a promising company in the field of very low energy consumption AI. Through this investment in GreenWaves Technologies, the Definvest fund will contribute to the development of a promising French sector from which the defence sector can benefit. This eighteenth investment confirms that Definvest remains, more than ever, an essential tool in the Ministry of the Armed Forces’ SME Action Plan.”

 “We are proud to have accompanied GreenWaves Technologies, a pioneer in the edge processor industry at a turning point in its recent history and to have helped it demonstrate the potential of its products and technology.  We are now particularly pleased to be financing round and to support the company in a new very exciting stage of growth.” said Vincent Deltrieu, Partner and Member of the management board of Innovacom.

“The expertise of the GreenWaves Technologies team in both architecture and software tools has made it possible to develop a new generation of easily programmable processors whose performance is unmatched . After 8 years of R&D, the company is now at an inflection point; we are happy to support GreenWaves Technologies in this new stage of its development, with a scaling up expected this year” adds Gwenael Hamon, Senior Investment Director of Bpifrance.

“Thales is very pleased to support the next round of development of GreenWaves Technologies. This investment will allow this French-based deeptech startup to keep scaling up its activity and expand its global reach,” complements Philippe Keryer, Thales Executive Vice President, Strategy, Research & Technology.