Eniac Goes to the edge with Fritz
We led a $2mm seed round to bring machine learning to edge computing
By Vic Singh, Founding General Partner
Machine learning models are becoming more sophisticated while gaining adoption at the edge on mobile and IoT devices, but their performance and efficiency is lacking since the models are designed to be run from a server. This degrades the end user experience as users wait for servers to process these complex models. This problem will become more pervasive as billions of mobile phones and millions of IoT devices like cars, home systems, personal gadgets, robots, medical equipment and others become more prevalent. The leading mobile apps have already caught on — think Snapchat with their face lenses, Google with smart replies in Gmail and Apple with Siri and Prisma with their AI style transfer.
Enter Fritz! Today we are pumped to announce that we’ve led their $2 million seed round with our friends at Uncork Capital and Hack VC. In a nutshell. Fritz is a developer platform that makes it easy to unlock the power of machine learning models by seamlessly enabling developers to deploy models directly onto their end user devices without the challenges and inefficiencies of server processing. Fritz provides developers with the tools to optimize, deploy, manage and analyze machine learning models across any device and platform.
Fritz sits on top of leading platforms like Core ML and TensorFlow Lite with more coming and helps developers deploy and manage machine learning models in their apps from prototype to scale. Fritz has gained traction with developers working on computer vision including image and scene recognition, object detection and artistic style transfer. We envision many other categories like UX personalization, big data processing and more to follow shortly.
In typical Eniac fashion, what truly led us to Fritz was the team. Based in Boston, where deep tech is having a major renaissance, co-founders Jameson Toole and Dan Abdinoor have the deep technical chops and street cred we look for in founders. Jameson has a PHD from MIT in statistical physics and machine learning, and Dan graduated from Virginia Tech in Computer Science. Jameson spent time as an engineer at Google and Dan started out as an early developer for Hubspot, but it wasn’t until they met at Jana that they realized they both had a passion to solve developer challenges.
After building Wherehouse, a location data analytics software for geospatial data, Jameson and Dan realized that a bigger opportunity existed to bring machine learning to the edge and Fritz was born. We are super excited to support them on their journey and if you are building ML models into your apps, please reach out!
Make sure to check them out at http://fritz.ai and subscribe to their newsletter Heartbeat on Medium.
