OCULI

OCULI is a fabless semiconductor company building programmable vision sensors for edge AI. Its OCULI SPU (Sensing and Processing Unit) processes visual data at the pixel and transmits only decisions rather than full image frames, which the company says cuts power consumption roughly 100x versus other edge AI approaches while responding in under 5 milliseconds with no cloud dependency. Because raw images never leave the device, the architecture is also privacy-preserving, and the same hardware is programmable across applications. The technology was spun out of Johns Hopkins University, where founder Charbel Rizk developed it, and the company relocated to Rochester, NY after winning the $1M Luminate NY optics and imaging accelerator prize in 2023.

Unlike a conventional CMOS image sensor that streams millions of mostly irrelevant pixels to a downstream processor, the OCULI SPU does the sensing and the inference in the same programmable device, so always-on battery-powered vision becomes practical.