Gorilla Technology announces $15m in funding from SBI Group

TAIPEI, Taiwan—Gorilla Technology Group, an edge AI and computer visions solutions provider, has secured $15 million in D-round funding from SBI Investment, a financial services company in Japan. The funding came before Gorilla's announcement to participate in the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to be held January 8-11, 2019 in Las Vegas. This is SBI's first investment in a Taiwanese, AI-focused company and will give SBI minority stake in Gorilla Technology.

Gorilla reached out to SBI, highlighting its work in creating viable solutions for Edge AI. The company's solutions process priority AI algorithms locally for real-time, intelligent results, while cloud and server-based AI is coordinated over a smart, optimized network connection. In addition, Gorilla recently certified on Intel's OpenVINO IoT toolkit.

The funds will help the company amplify their message of a complete scalable solution, now. “Video analytics applications have been hot topics and in strong demand in the security industry; however, the deployment has been slow due to lack of knowledge, or immature, underdeveloped solutions,” Dr. Spincer Koh, CEO, Gorilla Technology Group, told Security Systems News. “With this funding Gorilla will be able to promote their ready-to-market, end-to-end solution to the entire AI ecosystem, including hardware manufacturers, system integrators and end users across multiple verticals.”

When asked specifically how Gorilla plans to use the $15 million, Koh responded:
1.    Expansion of regional offices in Japan and other key markets to reach more end users;
2.    Further develop Gorilla's AI-based video analytics solution; and
3.    Integrate Gorilla's solution with Fintech and robotics industries in Japan to generate more AI-based applications.

“The main, initial impact [for the security industry] will be in the support Gorilla can offer,” Koh continued. “From training regional security manufacturers on hardware requirements to demonstrating ease of use and event management to end users, Gorilla will grow their teams in North America, Europe, Australia, Southeast Asia and Japan to offer a more complete support system for each step of their end-to-end solution.”

Gorilla Technology successfully completed A and B investment rounds in 2007 and 2009, respectively, by tapping EMC, and for round C in 2015, Telstra Ventures and Acer. Gorilla will continue to deepen their relationships with SBI Group, Intel and other partners to bring Edge AI and computer vision to the next level in system integration.

“SBI Group's investment into our company and vision strengthens our position as an Edge AI leader,” Koh said in the announcement. “It's a key driver toward our goals in video analytics technology, and keeps Gorilla positioned at the forefront of video AI technology. We can't wait to see what the future holds.”