History

Knowm Inc. exists to lead the computing industry toward neuromemristive processors. Our roots were planted in 2002, when lead inventor Alex Nugent began patenting his ideas around adaptive computing architectures and founded an intellectual property holding company called KnowmTech LLC with partners. Initial seed funding for the endeavor was made possible by business woman and entrepreneur, Hillary Riggs. Intellectual property services were provided by patent attorneys Kermit Lopez and Luis Ortiz. The IP portfolio spans memristive components and circuits all the way to large scale neuromorphic architectures.

After his proposed seedling pitch to DARPA to build an artificial synapses from nanoparticles was morphed into a full-scale DARPA program in 2007, Alex co-created and advised the DARPA SyNAPSE program. From 2011 to late 2018 Alex was awarded multiple government SBIR and STTR contracts to further develop knowm memristor computing technology.

In 2012, Tim Molter, joined the effort to lead software development and further design chip architectures with Alex. Alex and Tim published the formal introduction to AHaH computing in early 2014: AHaH Computing–From Metastable Switches to Attractors to Machine Learning.

In 2015 Knowm partnered with memristor fabrication pioneer Kris Campbell, Ph.D. from Boise State University, inventor of the Self Directed Channel (SDC) Memristor. Investor and consultant Sam Barakat joined the team to help launch Knowm Inc.

In 2018 AHaH Computing was proven feasible with Knowm SDC Memristors on the open-source Memristor Discovery platform.

In 2019, as suspicions of poor oxide memristor shelf life grow, Knowm memristors have passed four years of shelf-life testing and have been shipped to researchers in over forty countries. The discovery of the optically gated transistor leads to a memristor-photonics interface breakthrough, simplifying the design and fabrication of general-purpose memristor neural network processors with optical interfaces.

In 2020, CEO Alex Nugent builds a shared-access kT-RAM Server hosting hundreds of crossbars at his home during COVID lockdown.

15 Comments

    • Luis Ortiz
      reply

      Nice website.

      • Alex Nugent
        reply

        Thanks! Its taken a lot of work.

    • Jose
      reply

      As a layman with a deep interest in the coming AI era, my strong wish is that I had something of value to contribute to Knowm. Knowm’s seems by far the most holistic of approaches to this new paradigm. However, nothing impresses me more here than #9 in your Mission Statement. Take good care, and godspeed on your noble journey!

      • Alex Nugent
        reply

        Jose-thank you for the comment. Everybody has something valuable to contribute–it usually just takes getting to know each other. Probably the most valuable thing you could do right now is to go into nature and really look at it. Observe how it is built and how it builds itself. You are not looking for complexity–there is a simplicity under it all and everybody can see it with time. Once you see it–help somebody else to see it.

    • Jose
      reply

      Indeed! As a result of your eye-opening video lecture, I have been observing the rich leafage in our tropical climate with a relative open mind, and it all makes such good sense… Nature’s amazing diversity, self-repairing resilience, adaptive evolution, and apparent intelligence, may lead many to the conclusion that there must be a super-intelligent deity behind it all. But as you’ve noted so well, it all points to the physical/thermodynamics laws in our universe leading to an Occam’s razor in energy containment and dissipation.
      Thank you for all your time and effort spent to present these eye-opening ideas in such clear fashion. Looking forward to living long enough to see us outsmart 4 billion years of natural evolution! 🙂

    • Roland d'Humieres
      reply

      Amazing job! Amazing Team! Amazing Core Values! Amazing everything!
      Congratulations!

    • ed fernandez
      reply

      truly amazing what you are doing, congrats, wishing you all the best

    • Antoine
      reply

      Hi,
      This idea of sticking to nature is amazing, and the laws you infer are inspiring. Bravo. I am discovering the world of cognitive computing, and I wonder how far hardware has grown up today.
      What are the two integrated devices that you are looking at in the box on the team photo ?

      • Tim Molter
        reply

        @Antoine That’s two memristor chips from our first development batch.

    • Brian Hewitt
      reply

      Heh, I was looking for a way to ask if you were going to update xchart’s pdf writer. Then I read this page – fascinating. You have much bigger things to worry about.
      Good luck and I’ll be following.

    • Allen Rasafar
      reply

      Thank you for such a great progress. I am so excited to learn about your approach to innovate the technology with a leap forward thinking.
      Add me to your list of enthusiasts, for new innovation and let me know if I can be of help to support your team.

    • Stephen
      reply

      I am so excited by your work. It brings together my work in computer science and my environmental, okay Gaia, policies. My question is, will this need a new type of System Analysis (Oh no! Not another one!) to develop solutions that work for the systems and for people?

    • Adam Gerard
      reply

      Congrats! Exciting news – awesome progress!

    • Guarrera
      reply

      Congratulation to the team for these amazing results !
      All materials invite us to collaborate to the experience
      Stay tuned!
      JP

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