Clika, a company specialising in lightweight artificial intelligence (AI) model optimisation, said on Aug. 10 it was selected as the sole final pick in the global defence AI technology cooperation programme AI Joint Challenge.

The event was jointly hosted by Cap Vista, a strategic venture investment arm under Singapore's Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA), the Future Systems & Technology Directorate (FSTD) under Singapore's Ministry of Defence, and the Ministerial Agency for Defence AI (AMIAD) under France's Ministry of Defence.

It is a global competition designed to identify cutting-edge AI technologies that can be used to solve operational challenges faced by the two countries' defence agencies in security settings such as battlefields, humanitarian assistance and expeditionary operations, and to convert them into pilot projects (PoC) with real on-site impact.

The challenge consists of data anomaly detection, optimisation of deployable AI under constraints, and safe autonomous systems in complex environments. Clika said it applied to and was selected for the second task, an AI optimisation category that overcomes SWaP (size, weight and power) constraints and enables field deployment without performance degradation.

Clika said it will use the selection to accelerate its strategy to move beyond a company specialising in simple model compression and become an all-in-one AI deployment platform company spanning from models to device fleets.

Clika's all-in-one platform includes an integrated runtime, ClikaRT, that automatically deploys lightweight models to heterogeneous hardware including major operating systems and GPUs (CUDA, Vulkan), CPUs (x86, ARM64) and NPUs.

Clika CEO Nayul Kim (김나율) said, "In field and mission-critical environments where access to large-scale cloud is limited, efficient AI operation on edge devices determines the success or failure of operations." She said, "Thanks to close support from the NIPA Singapore IT Support Center, we gained a meaningful opportunity to prove our technological capabilities on the global stage. We will successfully carry out this PoC and establish ourselves as an unrivalled global leader in the global B2G and edge AI deployment infrastructure market."