The little startup that could. Picture this: a team of fewer than ten people sitting around a lunch table, dreaming big during their first company offsite. Edge Impulse was still pre-Series A, doing all the startup essentials: speaking at other people’s events, buying ads, sponsoring newsletters, anything to spread the word about edge AI and how it could transform businesses.
“What if we stopped depending on external platforms,” they mused. The conversation turned to NVIDIA’s GTC, Google I/O, and other industry-defining events. Why not Edge Impulse? Why not our own event series focused on how businesses can maximize performance by bringing intelligence to the edge instead of relying on the cloud? It was an audacious idea for a startup that could fit in a single conference room.
But that lunch table conversation had planted a seed: What if we could create something that brought together embedded engineers, data scientists, hardware makers, and business leaders to explore how to democratize edge AI, put AI right at the source of data, without needing massive computing power?
This isn’t just a story about a conference that grew up. It’s about how a community came together around a shared vision and made the impossible inevitable. Over five years, Imagine has been the stage where breakthrough technologies were unveiled, industry partnerships forged, and where thousands of developers learned to bring AI from the cloud to the edge.
Furthermore, edge AI isn’t experimental anymore — it’s transforming industries. Companies including NVIDIA, Capgemini, and Nestlé Purina have presented at Imagine as industrial edge AI moves from R&D into production-scale deployments.
This year marks our fifth anniversary — a milestone that feels both like a celebration and a launching pad. As we prepare for Imagine 2025 on October 1st, it’s time to look back on the journey that brought us here and look forward to the possibilities still ahead.
This is the story of how edge AI found its voice, its community, and its place in the world.
2021 — Year One
On September 29, 2021, only a few months after the initial lunch conversation, the world was still navigating the pandemic. Conferences that had gone virtual were now testing hybrid formats, and here was Edge Impulse launching a three-day edge AI event called Imagine. It was risky, bold, and perhaps a little crazy to debut a conference during a global pandemic.
Edge Impulse co-founder and CEO Zach Shelby opened the event by entering the stage on an electric scooter to demonstrate the theme of his presentation, "Building the Ultimate Experience with Data-Driven ML," where he discussed applied machine learning (ML), its commercial applications, and how it was changing industries.
The rest of the speaker lineup — an impressive collection of presenters, especially for a kickoff event —was a testament to the hard work and determination of a small team who endeavored to bring together the industry's best and brightest at an inaugural event, during a global pandemic, organized by a company practically no one had heard of. Speakers from Google, Microsoft, Arduino, NVIDIA, and others graced the Imagine stage that first year.
Finding Our Footing to Mainstream Momentum (2022-2023)
The great expansion. By 2022, that risky pandemic bet was paying off. The inaugural event had proven there was real hunger for edge AI community and education. It was time to go bigger with a multi-day in-person/hybrid event from September 28-30, 2022.
Our little startup was attracting attention. And the content matched the ambition. The team unveiled a suite of breakthrough technologies that would define the next phase of edge AI development: Assisted Labeling, FOMO-AD for anomaly detection, Bring Your Own Model capabilities, On-Device Calibration, and major enhancements to the EON Tuner and Compiler.
More importantly, 2022 marked the beginning of serious industry partnerships. The Weights & Biases integration showed that Edge Impulse was building bridges with the broader ML ecosystem, not just creating an island. Hardware partnerships with silicon vendors began expanding the reach beyond hobbyists to serious embedded developers.
Navigating the Breakthrough
But 2023 was when everything clicked. The September 27th event signaled a fundamental shift from educational workshops to industry impact, showcasing what edge AI could accomplish.
The speaker lineup read like a who’s who of technology: NVIDIA, Mattel, Know Labs, Lexmark, WhyLabs, Neurable, all presenting their case studies in real-world deployment. When Mattel explained how they were using edge AI in toy development, or when medical device companies shared their FDA-ready applications, it became clear that edge AI had made the leap from early adopters to mainstream acceptance.
By the end of 2023, the community had grown massively, and the technology had evolved from promising demos to mission-critical infrastructure. Not bad for an event that started out with almost no brand recognition, COVID restrictions, and managed to amass 200 in-person attendees, and over 2,000 who joined the livestream. The stage was set for what would come next: true industrial-scale deployment.
2024
From 2021 to 2024, we’ve grown the capabilities of the Edge Impulse platform, and through incredible use cases, we continue to witness the growth of an industry.
Our 2024 event showcased panels, fireside chats, individual presentations, and demos focused on scaling edge AI and enhancing the performance of edge devices. Customers shared how edge AI transformed their businesses by making the seemingly impossible, possible. And Edge Impulse unveiled our newest innovations designed for industrial applications.
The Ecosystem We Built (2025 and Beyond)
A movement, not just a conference. Five years later, that lunch table conversation has grown into something far beyond what those early employees could have imagined. Imagine 2025 isn’t just another annual conference, it’s the centerpiece of a thriving global edge AI ecosystem.
The numbers tell part of the story: 500,000+ projects on the platform, 220,000+ developers worldwide, and integration with industry giant Qualcomm following the acquisition of Edge Impulse. But the real achievement is qualitative — Edge Impulse has democratized AI development in a way that seemed unattainable just five years ago.
The partner ecosystem has evolved from those early academic collaborations to a Who’s who of technology leaders: NVIDIA, Advantech, Qualcomm, AWS, and countless others.
Legacy and Looking Ahead
Edge Impulse Imagine has become the catalyst that transformed edge AI from a niche technical curiosity into a fundamental business capability. The ripple effects extend far beyond Mountain View.
As we celebrate five years, the horizon holds even greater possibilities. Edge AI is poised to tackle humanity’s biggest challenges: enabling precision agriculture to feed growing populations, powering medical devices that democratize healthcare, and creating industrial systems that optimize resource usage while minimizing environmental impact.
Thank you to the thousands of attendees and dozens of speakers for making the big dreams of an audacious startup a reality. Join us at Imagine 2025 on October 1st as we celebrate how far we’ve come and chart where we’re going next. Whether you’ve been with us since that first virtual event or you’re just discovering the possibilities of edge AI, you’re part of a community that’s combining bold vision with practical execution, to change the world for the better.
Register for Imagine 2025 — in-person or streamed globally — and become part of the next chapter