Last night (my time), when trying to catch up on last week’s postings, I wrote down my thoughts about the “sold-out” VVDN Edge AI Boxes, but was too tired to read over it again and post it before going to bed. Since the overnight trading halt has not altered my conjecture, though, here we go:
I agree with
@itsol4605 that this is not a good look for a company supposed to be manufacturing a disruptive product that was announced ten (!) months ago.
Are VVDN possibly pursuing a manufacture on-demand strategy rather than stocking inventory in a warehouse? What I also find odd is that they don’t even list a unit price on their website, not to mention any rebates for purchasing those envisaged much larger orders.
(By the way, those of you imagining a stifling-the-competition conspiracy here, suggesting VVDN might deliberately give the NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX Edge AI Box an advantage over the Akida one, take note that the relevant VVDN NVIDIA Edge AI Box webpage is equally hard to find, doesn’t list a unit price either and features the same “ENQUIRE NOW” button instead of one saying “BUY NOW”).
On February 20, interested customers were finally able to place first orders for up to 10 Edge AI Boxes through the BrainChip website. This in itself was already a twice-shifted timeline, as the original September 2023 announcement had promised the pre-sale (through BrainChip directly) to commence by December 2023 at the latest, while a second press release dated December 14, 2023 all of a sudden postponed the “expected” beginning of the pre-sale to January 15, three days after the end of CES 2024, the Las Vegas trade show where “the industry’s first Edge Box based on neuromorphic technology” was supposed to be demonstrated for the first time. While I personally didn’t attend CES 2024 and thus cannot vouch for the physical device’s absence from the BrainChip booth, I merely recall Nandan Nayampally’s CES podcast with Kalpesh Chauhan from VVDN, but no photos or videos of the demo that was to have taken place.
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While I can’t say whether or not this issue really concerns “a lot of people”, I am indeed aware of a case of someone who claims he had ordered (and fully paid) the Edge AI Box through the BrainChip website months ago. Yet, our company’s communication regarding the delivery date has allegedly been extremely poor - for many weeks, there seems to have been no information regarding the shipment date at all, and since early May, the only update provided to the buyer has apparently been that the expected timeframe for the delivery will be the early 3rd quarter 2024 (which should be any day now) and that a follow-up email would be sent once the shipping date was getting closer: it concerns the poster on HC who goes by the username mapp and who strikes me as far from being a downramper. True, mapp is an anonymous poster like all of us, so it is difficult to verify his claim, but from the posts I’ve read, I don’t see a reason to doubt the accuracy of that claim.
I took the trouble to sift through mapp’s posts on HC (there are far more irrelevant posts in heated political threads than relevant ones to BRN if you click on the username) and selected about half of them to give you sort of a timeline
- from order placement and full payment in late February
- to the first email thereafter dated May 8 (two and a half months later!) with the estimated delivery timeframe early 3rd Q/2024 (even though our company had announced by mid-February they were going to communicate specific shipment dates by April 30)
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- to no update, yet, as of early July, regarding the exact delivery date.
And I am pretty sure mapp would by now have shared any further progress, if there had been any.
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Again, not a good look, neither for VVDN nor our company.
I had also been wondering why there was no Edge AI Box anywhere to be seen in BrainChip’s social media posts about the 2024 embedded world in April, despite NVISO
and VVDN being listed as demo partnerships on
https://brainchip.com/embeddedworld.
If I am not mistaken, the first time we actually got to see a physical Akida Edge AI Box was at the AGM? Three days later, I spotted (the same or another?) one in the photos featuring our 2024 Embedded Vision Summit booth, and a video of Todd Vierra demoing one of its many use cases at said conference was uploaded two weeks later. By that time, I would have expected them to have at least one shelf of ready-to-be shipped units.
For a short while, it was possible to pre-order a single unit or up to 10 Edge AI Boxes through BrainChip directly, before the item was marked as “sold out” on
https://shop.brainchipinc.com/products.
While it is perfectly legitimate to call itsol4605’s statement an unsubstantiated claim and ask him/her for some evidence to back it up, accusing him/her of “telling lies” would imply that itsol4605 is making this up despite knowing it is not true and is thus intentionally trying to deceive us.
So can you,
@7für7, at least provide any counter-evidence? Do you happen to know anyone who pre-ordered an Akida Edge AI Box and has already received theirs and could hence post a photo of the invoice (blackening out personal details) on top of their Edge AI Box as proof?
Or have you enquired with BrainChip directly whether or not any of the pre-ordered Edge AI Boxes have been shipped to customers, yet, before you accuse another poster of being a liar?
To me, the circumstantial evidence (if I may call it that) all points to the VVDN Akida Edge AI Boxes simply not being ready for shipping, yet - whatever the underlying issue is and whoever is to blame. I would advise those of you envisaging substantial revenue from the initial sale of these Edge AI Boxes in the upcoming 4C to massively lower their expectations: IMO, the “sold out” resp “enquire now” does not seem to be a case of too high a demand and waiting for a second batch to be manufactured, or else customers who had ordered their Edge AI Box by late February should have long received it by now (provided mapp’s story is true).
If I were a customer who had paid US$ 800 up front for a product almost five months ago and still hadn’t received my order by now, I would at least expect transparent communication on behalf of the company in case of financial disagreements with VVDN, production delays or other logistics failures. Such things happen and it may not be the fault of anyone in particular - it could even be due to reasons beyond either company’s control, such as a sea freight container going overboard - but setbacks like that should be dealt with in a more professional manner rather than charging customers up front and then keep them waiting and waiting for months, overtaxing their patience. Although those buying only a single or a few units are considered small fry in the grand scheme of things by our company, they should still be treated with the same respect as the big fish our IP business model is chasing.
Informing those pre-order customers on the shop website these days that “BrainChip Sales will provide delivery dates
once orders are processed” is something I perceive as a slap in the face of those who put trust in the company by placing their orders right away once the pre-sale had opened instead of waiting for favourable reviews or benchmarking reports before making a decision.
How many more months do they supposedly need for processing those orders?? It all reeks of some unforeseen problems, if you ask me, and the sales department should at least have the decency to admit to this rather than continue to shift the timelines without explanation.
I’d be more than happy to be proven wrong, though.
GLTAH
