5G and artificial intelligence (AI) chipmaker EdgeQ emerged from stealth mode today with a $51 million funding round led by Threshold Ventures, Fusion Fund, and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang.

The company, which is made up of industry veterans from companies like Qualcomm, Intel, and Broadcom, is building AI-infused 5G modems.

"We have a lot of experience building 5G and 4G. If you've ever used an Android or an Apple phone, this team had something to do with it," said EdgeQ CEO Yinay Ravuri, in an interview with SDxCentral. "Fundamentally, we are building a 5g modem, plus AI acceleration in the single chip."

However, it's important to note that EdgeQ isn't looking to overtake Qualcomm in the mobile market. Instead, EdgeQ is focusing on enabling what it sees as the next big market for cellular connectivity: IoT.

Without discussing the company's first chip, which Ravuri claims will be announced in the coming months, he laid out the landscape in which EdgeQ aims to divide and conquer.

"We are not going into the cellphone space," he said. "We're going after the transformative or the revolutionary part of 5G."

What Ravuri is referring to is the low-latency, high-availability qualities of 5G that could enable new use cases and improve existing ones, particularly in industrial settings. "Factory automation is something that comes up a lot — people call it Industry 4.0," he said.

For example, in a factory producing automobiles, today's infrastructure might involve the limited use of robotic welders which will join pieces of metal as the vehicle passes from one part of the factory to the next. EdgeQ envisions a future where 5G connectivity will enable the robots to go to the cars.

"There are inherent efficiencies in doing that. You can refit the car factory very easily for a different type of model, different cars, non-cars," he said.

It's in this environment that Ravuri claims 5G modems that feature onboard machine learning capabilities will have distinct advantages over more traditional wired and wireless networking.

Another area EdgeQ sees itself breaking into, in the short term, are warehouses where robots are already being used to fetch things like merchandise. By integrating AI capabilities into the network layer, tasks like sorting cargo containers can be reduced from days to hours, according to Ravuri.

The company is tying its modems to an open, software-programmable platform for both the devices and the edge infrastructure itself.

EdgeQ recognizes that different kinds of networks may be used in private industrial settings, including licensed and unlicensed spectrum. By building 5G and AI hardware with heavy contributions from software, customers will be able to deploy more flexible networks that are less expensive to operate, Ravuri said.

“To deliver on the promise of 5G, the market needs flexible, software-programmable silicon that can be fit-for-purpose. For example, autonomous vehicles and robotics will require both high-quality 5G connectivity and powerful AI computing capabilities,” Yang said in a statement.