Nervana Systems
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Artificial intelligence software |
| Founded | 2014 |
| Founder | Naveen Rao, Amir Khosrowshahi, Arjun Bansal |
| Fate | Acquired by Intel |
| Headquarters | San Diego and Palo Alto, California , United States |
Key people | Naveen Rao (CEO), Amir Khosrowshahi (CTO), Arjun Bansal (VP of Algorithms) |
| Products | Nervana Cloud, neon deep learning framework, Nervana Engine (ASIC) |
Number of employees | 48 |
| Parent | Intel Corporation |
Nervana Systems was a company specializing in artificial intelligence software, with offices located in both San Diego, California and Palo Alto, California. It provided a comprehensive software-as-a-service platform named Nervana Cloud, which allowed enterprises to create tailored deep learning solutions. On August 9, 2016, Intel purchased Nervana for an estimated $408 million.
Deep learning framework
Nervana created an open-source deep learning platform known as neon. This framework claimed enhanced performance compared to alternatives such as Caffe, Theano, Torch, and TensorFlow. Its advantages stemmed from assembler-level optimizations, support for multiple GPUs, and the implementation of the Winograd algorithm to optimize convolution operations.
Nervana Cloud
Introduced in February 2016, Nervana Cloud was developed on top of the Neon framework and utilized Nvidia Titan X GPUs for its operations. Additionally, Nervana was in the process of designing a proprietary application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) called the Nervana Engine. This chip was engineered exclusively for deep learning tasks, promising performance improvements up to ten times higher than Nvidia's Maxwell GPU architecture by concentrating solely on neural network processing components and omitting traditional graphics features.
History
Established in 2014 by CEO Naveen Rao, CTO Amir Khosrowshahi (who is related to Dara Khosrowshahi), and VP of Algorithms Arjun Bansal, Nervana secured $28 million in funding. This included a $20.5 million Series A round in June 2015 led by Data Collective, with participation from investors such as Allen & Company, AME Cloud Ventures, Playground Global, CME Group, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Fuel Capital, Lux Capital, and Omidyar Network. When Intel acquired the company in 2016, Nervana employed approximately 48 people. In January 2020, Intel ceased further development of Nervana products to prioritize its acquisition of Habana Labs.