Infineon Bolsters Its TinyML and Edge AI Portfolio, Acquires Imagimob Lock, Stock, and Barrel

Infineon Technologies has announced the acquisition of Imagimob, a Swedish company founded in 2013 that aims to make it easier to develop edge AI and tiny machine learning (tinyML) projects for everything from the smart home and automotive sectors to industrial and medical.

"With Infineon we can accelerate our customer’s developments, enable new applications and help them to differentiate in their markets," claims Imagimob co-founder and chief executive officer Anders Hardebring of the acquisition. "Becoming an integral part of the Infineon ecosystem with their profound application expertise and an extensive product portfolio allows us energy efficient and secure implementation of advanced sensing and control in IoT [Internet of Things] contexts."

"Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning respectively are about to largely enter every embedded application and thus enable new functionalities. With Imagimob's outstanding platform and its expertise in developing robust machine learning solutions for edge devices, we further strengthen our ability to enable new levels of control and energy efficiency on our products while preserving privacy," adds Infineon's Thomas Rosteck. "We enable our customers to leverage the advantages from AI/ML and bring their products to market quickly by building on our advanced sensors and IoT solutions portfolio."

Founded in 2013, Imagimob offers a quick-start development system for edge AI and on-device tinyML projects — including what the company calls "automatic machine learning," or "AutoML." The company's promise is to take a developer from data collection to deploying a model on a low-power resource-constrained edge device in mere minutes, offering everything from audio and signal classification to gesture recognition, fall detection — as demonstrated in Swanholm Tech's Connected Safety Vest project — and radar-driven material detection.

The company's platform became a lot more tempting to makers and hobbyists late last year, when Imagimob announced a "Free Forever" pricing tier which replaced its previous time-limited trial offering. "Users can go to the Imagimob website and download the software and get started," promised Hardebring at the time. "Users of the forever free plan will have access to the full functionality of the platform, but will have a limitation in compute credits."

The acquisition sees Infineon pick up Imagimob in its entirety for an undisclosed sum, turning the company into a wholly-owned subsidiary. At the time of writing, neither company had announced any lay-offs or changes to the pricing structure or product offerings as a result of the deal.