“The edge is where AI meets the real world. Today it takes months of engineering to get there. CLIKA automates that engineering job — compress, benchmark, and run any AI across a heterogeneous device fleet — so anyone can do an on-device AI project within hours. We’re excited to partner with the Edge AI Foundation to bring that future closer.” — Nayul Kim, CEO, CLIKA
The Edge AI Foundation is thrilled to welcome CLIKA as our newest strategic startup partner. Founded in Seoul in 2021 and now headquartered in San Jose, California, CLIKA is making on-device AI something any organization can do — not just those with dedicated hardware engineering teams.
Deploying AI at the edge has traditionally demanded months of specialized engineering. Teams must manually tune, reconfigure, and maintain separate optimization pipelines for every distinct chipset architecture — whether targeting NVIDIA, Intel, Qualcomm, or AMD silicon. CLIKA removes this friction through automation.
At the core of CLIKA’s platform is its proprietary Automated Compression Engine (ACE). Rather than requiring developers to manage quantization by hand or upload sensitive assets to public clouds, ACE automatically analyzes deep learning models — spanning vision, audio, language, and multimodal architectures — and generates a bespoke optimization strategy for the target hardware. Mixed-precision quantization, graph optimization, layer fusion, layer replacement, and final compilation are consolidated into a single unified workflow, producing high-performance models — with memory footprints reduced by up to 90% — that fit heterogeneous, resource-constrained platforms without sacrificing baseline accuracy. Underpinning this is CLIKA’s Precision-Aware Quantization technology, which scans each model, understands its unique sensitivity profile, and applies a bespoke quantization recipe tailored to that specific architecture — no two models are treated the same.
Optimization is only half the journey; models still have to run somewhere. That is where ClikaRT, CLIKA’s integrated runtime, comes in. ClikaRT deploys and executes ACE-optimized models across Windows, macOS, iOS, and Linux, on CUDA- and Vulkan-based GPUs, x86 and ARM64 CPUs, TPUs, and NPUs. Together, ACE and ClikaRT form a complete pipeline from trained model to running edge application — one automated path across an otherwise fragmented hardware landscape.
Importantly, CLIKA’s business model reflects this philosophy. CLIKA equips customers with the optimization capability itself, rather than delivering one-off copies of pre-optimized models. Clients operate the engine on their own models, on their own infrastructure, on their own timeline — a structural difference that keeps them independent as their models, data, and hardware targets evolve. And because the entire workflow runs strictly on-premises or within fully air-gapped infrastructure, CLIKA serves privacy-sensitive sectors, critical infrastructure, and highly regulated industries where cloud-based data sharing is prohibited.
This approach has already earned significant market validation. CLIKA has secured channel partnerships with technology consulting leader Accenture and global industrial edge-computing leader Advantech. Its software runs in production across five allied nations — the United States, Australia, Singapore, France, and South Korea — with deployments within public safety and national security agencies, such as the next-generation AI Patrol Vehicle developed for the Korea National Police Agency. Most recently, CLIKA was selected as a finalist in the AI Joint Challenge organized by Singapore’s defense agencies (DSTA/FSTD) and France’s defense AI agency (AMIAD), addressing field-deployable AI in SWaP-constrained environments. The company’s rapid trajectory has also placed it in premier innovation programs including Intel Ignite, Google AI First, Plug and Play, and TechCrunch Disrupt.
As a Start-Up level strategic partner, CLIKA will be actively integrating into the Edge AI Foundation ecosystem, engaging with our dedicated Technical Program Committees and working groups over the next year.
We are also proud to announce that CLIKA is stepping up as the official VIP dinner sponsor at our upcoming Defense Symposium in Washington, D.C. Make sure to connect with the CLIKA team live at the symposium!
Welcome to the foundation, CLIKA!
