The Toyota Tsusho Group’s electronics trading company NEXTY Electronics Corporation (President: Atsushi Aoki; Headquarters: Minato-ku, Tokyo; hereinafter referred to as “NEXTY Electronics”) and the AI computing innovator revolutionizing automotive and edge computing company Blaize, Inc. (CEO: Dinakar Munagala; Headquarters: California, USA; hereinafter referred to as “Blaize”) announced NEXTY is now a Blaize distribution partner serving automotive and industrial markets for AI edge computing in Japan on July, 2021.

【Background and Purpose】　

Edge computing distributes processing of the massive volume of data obtained from sensors inside and outside of automobiles from the cloud to on-board devices or edge servers installed between those devices and the cloud. With the realization of autonomous driving well under way, the need for fast data processing that uses this technology will continue to grow. In addition, expectations are high that rapid edge processing of data obtained by a vast number of installed sensors will reduce labor costs for a variety of industries.

Blaize a North American start-up company with key technologies for AI high-performance semiconductors. By signing this distributor agreement, Nexty Electronics is now able to provide Blaize’s AI edge computing products that is high  processing performance, low latency, and high power efficiency due to reduced memory access.

With multiple feature advancements over legacy GPU and CPU solutions, the Blaize Pathfinder SOM and Xplorer AI accelerators coupled with the Blaize AI Studio and Blaize Picasso SDK enable a new era of more practical and commercially viable edge AI products across a wide range of edge use cases and industries. The company also has a rich roadmap of automotive products coming online to serve model years 2023 and beyond.

Blaize tightly coupled software and hardware delivers an end-to-end efficient and usable AI edge workflow, and solutions that fit into real-life budgets of power, cost, size and complexity.

“We are pleased to leverage our partnership with Blaize to provide cutting-edge solutions to a wide range of Nexty Electlonics’ customers.” said Kiyotaka Nakao, Managing Director of Nexty Electlonics. “Edge AI computing technology is evolving rapidly and is sure to become more and more important to the semiconductor industry’s business. We hope that combining Nexty Electronics’ abundant knowledge of semiconductor peripheral technology with Blaize products and will open up many business opportunities.” 

“We are excited to work with NEXTY realizing benefits from their strength in delivering systems that enable customers to innovate with AI,” said Richard Terrill, VP Strategic Business Development, Blaize.“Their focus on innovation and anticipating customer needs across multiple industries is well aligned with the requirements to drive adoption of edge AI applications enabled by Blaize low power, low latency and compute efficient AI inference accelerator offering.”

NEXTY Electronics is a world leader in car electronics, and successfully application of technology and innovation advances in areas such as autonomous driving to other markets, such as IoT, manufacturing and industrial equipment. As such, NEXTY is an ideal distribution partner for Blaize AI hardware and software products serving customers who are adopting AI to process the growing volume of edge data, provide more insight, develop new AI models and deploy new edge systems.

About NEXTY Electronics Corp.

NEXTY Electronics, an electronics trading company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan is one of the core members of the Toyota Tsusho Group’s electronics business and boasts top-of-class scale in the automotive electronics sector. With its core strengths of technology and products, NEXTY Electronics meets customer and global needs in a broad range of areas and provides solutions to the challenges faced by society. It achieves this by actively adapting the autonomous driving, connected and other leading-edge technologies it has cultivated in the automotive electronics sector for use in other industries. It offers optimum global solutions that transcend regions and business boundaries by leveraging the Toyota Tsusho Group’s global network and intensifying its discovery of the cutting-edge proprietary technologies of startups from around the world. Visit the links below for more information.

NEXTY Electronics website: https://www.nexty-ele.com/english/

About Blaize

Blaize leads new-generation computing unleashing the potential of AI to enable leaps in the value technology delivers to improve the way we all work and live. Blaize offers transformative edge computing solutions for AI data collection and processing at the edge of network, with focus on smart vision applications including automobility, retail, security, industrial and metro. Blaize has secured US$155M in equity funding to date from strategic and venture investors Franklin Templeton, Temasek, DENSO, Daimler, SPARX Group, Magna, Samsung Catalyst Fund, GGV Capital, Wavemaker and SGInnovate. With headquarters in El Dorado Hills (CA), Blaize has teams in Campbell (CA), Cary (NC), and subsidiaries in Hyderabad (India), Manila (Philippines), and Leeds and Kings Langley (UK), with 300+ employees worldwide.

Blaize website： www.blaize.com