Nervana Systems was an artificial intelligence software company based in

San Diego, California San Diego ( , ; ) is a city on the Pacific Ocean coast of Southern California located immediately adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a 2020 population of 1,386,932, it is the eighth most populous city in the United Stat ...

, and

Palo Alto, California Palo Alto (; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. The city was es ...

. The company provided a full-stack software-as-a-service platform called Nervana Cloud that enabled businesses to develop custom

deep learning Deep learning (also known as deep structured learning) is part of a broader family of machine learning methods based on artificial neural networks with representation learning. Learning can be supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised. ...

software. On August 9, 2016, it was acquired by

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 ser ...

, for an estimated $408 million.

Deep learning framework

The company's (now discontinued) open source deep learning framework is calle
neon
Neon which the company said would outperform rival frameworks such as Caffe,

Theano In Greek mythology, Theano (; Ancient Greek: Θεανώ) may refer to the following personages: *Theano, wife of Metapontus, king of Icaria. Metapontus demanded that she bear him children, or leave the kingdom. She presented the children of Mel ...

Torch A torch is a stick with combustible material at one end, which is ignited and used as a light source. Torches have been used throughout history, and are still used in processions, symbolic and religious events, and in juggling entertainment. I ...

, and

TensorFlow TensorFlow is a free and open-source software library for machine learning and artificial intelligence. It can be used across a range of tasks but has a particular focus on training and inference of deep neural networks. "It is machine learnin ...

– would achieve its performance advantage through assembler-level optimization, multi-GPU support, and use of an algorithm called Winograd for computing

convolutions In mathematics (in particular, functional analysis), convolution is a mathematical operation on two functions ( and ) that produces a third function (f*g) that expresses how the shape of one is modified by the other. The term ''convolution'' ...

, which are common mathematical operations in the deep learning process.

Nervana Cloud

Nervana Cloud, announced in February 2016, is based on Neon, and ran on

Nvidia Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

Titan X GPUs, but Nervana was also developing a custom

application-specific integrated circuit An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC ) is an integrated circuit (IC) chip customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use, such as a chip designed to run in a digital voice recorder or a high-effici ...

(ASIC) called the Nervana Engine that was optimized for deep learning and that Nervana said would perform 10x better than

Maxwell architecture GPUs. The Nervana Engine was expected to achieve greater compute density by implementing only those design elements that are necessary to support deep learning algorithms and ignoring legacy elements specific to graphics processing.

History

Nervana was founded in 2014 by CEO Naveen Rao, CTO Amir Khosrowshahi (

Dara Khosrowshahi Dara Khosrowshahi ( fa, دارا خسروشاهی, ; born May 28, 1969) is an Iranian-American businessman and the chief executive officer of Uber. Khosrowshahi was previously CEO of Expedia Group, a company that owns several travel fare aggreg ...

's cousin), and VP Algorithms Arjun Bansal. Nervana has raised $28 million in funding. In June 2015, Nervana raised $20.5 million in series A funding led by Data Collective with participation from

Allen & Company Allen & Company LLC is an American privately held boutique investment bank based at 711 Fifth Avenue, New York. The firm specializes in real estate, technology, media and entertainment. History Founded in 1922 by Charles Robert Allen, Jr., he ...

, AME Cloud Ventures,

Playground Global Playground Global is an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in deep tech and assists startups with software, hardware, machine learning, marketing, talent and design. The company was founded in 2015 by Andy Rubin, Peter Barrett, Matt ...

, the

CME Group CME Group Inc. (Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Chicago Board of Trade, New York Mercantile Exchange, The Commodity Exchange) is an American global markets company. It is the world's largest financial derivatives exchange, and trades in asset clas ...

Draper Fisher Jurvetson Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) is an American venture capital firm focused on investments in enterprise, consumer and disruptive technologies. In January 2019, DFJ Venture, the early-stage team, spun out and formed Threshold Ventures. DFJ Growth ...

, Fuel Capital,

Lux Capital Lux Capital is a venture capital firm based in New York City. It was founded in 2000, and focuses on investments in emerging technologies. History Lux Capital was founded in 2000 by Peter Hébert, Robert Paull and Josh Wolfe. In April 2011, for ...

, and

Omidyar Network Omidyar Network is a self-styled " philanthropic investment firm," composed of a foundation and an impact investment firm. Established in 2004 by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam, Omidyar Network has committed over $1.5billion to ...

. It was estimated to have only 48 employees when it was acquired by

in 2016. In January 2020, Intel shut down the development of Nervana in favor of its acquisition of Habana Labs.

References

{{reflist Companies based in San Diego Companies based in Palo Alto, California American companies established in 2014 Software companies based in California 2016 mergers and acquisitions Intel acquisitions Software companies of the United States