BrainChip Holdings Limited (ASX:BRN) CEO, Louis DiNardo talks about applications for and interest in the company's BrainChip Studio and BrainChip Accelerator products, the large addressable market opportunity and revenue guidance for 2018 and 2019.Jessica Amir: Hello Jessica Amir here for the Finance News Network. Joining me from BrainChip Holdings Limited
(ASX:BRN) is CEO Lou DiNardo. Hi Lou, welcome back.
Louis DiNardo: Thank you very much. Good to see you again.
Jessica Amir: Thanks for joining us from California. For those of you that don't know, just tell us where BrainChip
(ASX:BRN) has come from and how you see the company currently positioned.
Louis DiNardo: I think BrainChip's come from a very interesting place. We take the neuroscience component of what we do and mix it with digital technology. We've taken great strides to commercialise our product. What we provide to the marketplace is a fully integrated spiking neural network which solves very sophisticated problems by approaching it with the neuroscience matter in which your brain works. We use it to practice in digital logic.
Jessica Amir: Now to your sales strategy Lou, your most recent quarterly update talked about some collaborations and gave some guidance around the revenues that could eventuate later this year, but could you be a bit more specific for our audience?
Louis DiNardo: Certainly. I think this year has been, at least so far this year, this has been a year of great strides for us. We announced a collaboration with a company called Gaming Partners International. GPI has the lion's share of all currency shipped into casinos around the world, so chips on the table and the lion's share of that currency. Our effort with them is to provide a visual analytic tool so that we can guard against... So called currency security. We can guard against counterfeit. We can guard against collaboration and cheating at the table. We partner with GPI, they do business with all 3,500 casinos in the world. There's 68,000 gaming tables in the world that need to be protected. We have that leverage, we have that reach through our sales force. Similarly, we announced a collaborative effort with a company called Quantum Corporation, which is a large-scale storage manufacturer. We also announced a collaborative effort with a company called Veritone. Veritone is similar in that it's a storage application, but it's provided in the cloud.
Jessica Amir: What do you see as the real market opportunity for BrainChip products?
Louis DiNardo: So we will take what is currently done in software or currently done partly in software and in hardware, we'll reduce that to practice in a single chip solution, which the Akida device, which is currently in development, the software kernel is already in the hands of one of the largest European automobile manufacturers. It's been reduced to practice for other key customers as well in other vertical segments, but it opens up a very wide aperture for us and market opportunities. Beyond vision we'll be able to analyse what we call big data, it could be agricultural data, it could be financial technology data, stock and options trade, high frequency trading, you could be cyber security data.
Today we're building a large business around vision applications, as Akida comes to the fore in the later part of 2018 and early 2019 it opens up that aperture. We recognise that it's about a US$7 billion market opportunity. So it's a great landscape for us and Akida is going to be the first neuromorphic system on a chip available in the commercial market.
Jessica Amir: Can you say who the car manufacturer is in Europe that you're working with?
Louis DiNardo: We've not discussed that publicly. It's a major German automobile manufacturer. There's been a lot of speculation in the market. I would also say that we're not limited to that one engagement. We're also in Detroit. We're also in other parts of Europe outside of Germany. There are major manufacturers in Germany, everyone from Volkswagen, which has the Porsche, Audi brands. You have Mercedes Benz of course. You've got BMW. In Detroit you've got the big three, Ford, Chrysler, General Motors. But there are also third party manufacturers that supply systems to the automobile manufactures. In the United States you have Continental. You've got Delphi in France. You've got Nelio. Those are all prime opportunities for us. Frankly, they're a little faster time to market because those collaborations don't have to go through the rigorous supply of qualifications that you go through in the pure play automobile manufacturer market. So our focus is both the top tier automobile manufacturers as well as those third parties that supply to the top tier automobile manufacturers.
Jessica Amir: Now to AI, or artificial intelligence, in the competition landscape, what makes BrainChip and its products so unique?
Louis DiNardo: That's probably the most important question. What makes BrainChip different is the way artificial intelligence is typically reduced to practice today is still doing computer, mathematical computing, six point or floating point mathematics we don't do that. We actually mirror the way your brain works. We take data inputs and we generate electrical spikes which really mirror the way your brain operates. Those spikes get mapped and they get mapped against or correlated to specific trends that any end user would like to see. It's very low power. It's work in very low resolution, very noisy environments. There's no mathematics involved. It's high performance, low latency, low power.
Jessica Amir: Lastly Lou, what can investors look forward to for the rest of this year and into 2019?
Louis DiNardo: Investors in late 2018 and into 2019 will see and should enjoy the commercialisation of 10 years’ worth of effort on the part of our founder Peter van der Made. Again, we introduced our products in the later part of 2017. Sales cycle is such that we're at the point where we've got a nice sales funnel. The back half of 2018 should be a very successful year for us and 2019 will continue that success but also introduce the Akida product, which opens up a much wider opportunity for us.
Jessica Amir: Wonderful. Thanks so much Lou DiNardo for the update.
Louis DiNardo: Thank you very much.
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