A group of executives who previously worked in the wireless business of EchoStar's Dish Network are now launching a startup called Edgescale AI.
"AI is having an impact on everything we do," said Marc Rouanne, Edgescale AI's co-founder, chairman and CTO, in an interview with Light Reading. Rouanne was previously chief network officer of Dish Network, an EchoStar company that's building a fourth nationwide 5G network. Rouanne, a longtime Nokia executive, joined Dish Network in 2019 and was the chief architect of the company's cloud-based, open radio access network (RAN).
Now, Rouanne is launching a startup that sits at the intersection of AI and edge computing.
"There's going to be a massive market acceleration," Rouanne said of AI services at the edge. Edgescale AI plans to act as a liaison between AI technology providers and their customers, he said, explaining that the startup is working to connect AI services with customer data, and customer data with AI services.
"The goal is to automate at scale," Rouanne said.
The Palantir deal
Edgescale AI emerged from stealth earlier this month touting a new agreement with AI provider Palantir. "Live Edge" is the result of the companies' partnership.
"Live Edge combines Palantir's Edge AI products – Palantir Apollo and Palantir Sensor Inference Platform (SIP) – with Edgescale's Virtual Connected Edge (VCE) cloud, to continuously deliver AI applications to the autonomous devices and the fingertips of people at the edge," Palantir wrote in a blog post. "We believe our partnership represents the most advanced implementation of cloud-native software over distributed infrastructure, meeting the high reliability demanded by industries. For the first time, Live Edge enables the delivery of AI applied directly to systems of action at scale."
Launched roughly 20 years ago, Palantir is a pioneering AI player that enjoyed early success in the US intelligence and defense industries. Now, it's a public company with billions of dollars in annual revenues from sales in the government and commercial sectors.
Rouanne said Palantir is consuming Edgescale AI's services as it would consume computing resources in the cloud. Edgescale AI, which is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider, is essentially helping to route AI traffic, manage APIs and handle CPU and GPU connections so that Palantir can focus on providing specific AI use cases instead of dealing with the technologies underpinning those connections, he explained.
Exodus from Dish
Brian Mengwasser is Edgescale AI's other co-founder and its CEO. Mengwasser was the co-founder of Aurora Insight, which was acquired by Maxar Technologies last year.
Mengwasser joined Dish as VP of the company's MarketPlace and Apps Design, essentially leading work with developers. However, that effort appears to have been subsumed by the global wireless industry's broad push toward open network APIs under the auspices of GSMA Open Gateway, TM Forum and others. Roughly a year ago, Nokia announced Dish as the first network operator to use its Network as Code API platform.
Rouanne declined to discuss Edgescale AI's leadership team and its fundraising efforts. However, according to the company's LinkedIn profile, other Dish executives that now work at Edgescale AI include engineer Vinayak Sharma, architect Praveen Mada and engineer Hamza Khokhar.
Rouanne and Mengwasser aren't the only Dish executives to leave the company. Following Rouanne's departure from the network operator earlier this year, most of Dish's founding wireless leadership team – including Stephen Bye and Dave Mayo – have left the company.
EchoStar, for its part, may have averted bankruptcy with its recent deal to sell its Dish-branded satellite TV business to DirecTV. That agreement appears to have paved the way for EchoStar to continue to pursue the wireless business under the leadership of longtime Dish executive John Swieringa and newly appointed CEO Hamid Akhavan.