Edge Impulse

About Edge Impulse

Edge Impulse is a development platform for creating, deploying, and scaling machine learning (ML) applications on edge devices. Founded in 2019 by Zach Shelby and Jan Jongboom, who previously worked together on IoT systems at Arm, the company aims to simplify and accelerate the process of building ML solutions for hardware with limited resources, such as microcontrollers. The founders' experience in embedded technology was central to their vision of making ML accessible to all developers for creating intelligent devices.

The company's core offering is a software platform that manages the entire MLOps lifecycle, from data acquisition and labeling to model training, testing, and deployment. It allows developers to collect real-world sensor data, use powerful automation and low-code tools to build datasets, and then train, optimize, and deploy ML models to a wide range of hardware targets. The platform is designed to be hardware-agnostic, supporting everything from MCUs to CPUs and GPUs, and can package the final model into an optimized C++ library for efficient on-device performance. Key features include tools for synthetic data generation, anomaly detection, and performance tracking.

Edge Impulse operates on a business model that includes a free community tier for individual developers and enterprise-level subscriptions for organizations, which offer advanced features like increased compute performance and automated data pipelines. Its clients range from individual developers to large enterprises and government agencies, with applications in industrial predictive maintenance, asset tracking, and consumer health wearables. By 2021, the platform had grown to nearly 30,000 developers across thousands of enterprises working on over 50,000 projects. The company raised a total of over $50 million in funding through several rounds, including a $34 million Series B led by Coatue in December 2021. In March 2025, Edge Impulse was acquired by Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. to accelerate the adoption of AI in IoT solutions and expand Qualcomm's own AI capabilities.