That quote by Ken does seem surprising? The Renesas deal was...

That quote by Ken does seem surprising? The Renesas deal was signed around about then - so they certainly knew what they wanted to do. It would be hard to imagine the other 14 EAPs including Ford, Valeo and NASA didn’t know what they wanted at that point? I would have thought the reference may have been from at least a couple of years ago - that makes more sense to me. The wheels of industry certainly seem to have been turning in Brainchip‘s direction for longer than a year? Perhaps Ken was re-quoting something said to him that was older?
I guess this does highlight that there is still a way to go in terms of on device processing being provided with all the necessary infrastructure in the various current use cases from design thru to implementation. When I think about the revolution Brainchip are offering - it will require some drastic changes be made to support it. There is no doubt in my mind however that those changes are a choice. I think the reality is setting in on many fronts not the least of which is the scaling problem of current technology to be capable of making the IOT intelligent. The only way to do that is thru on-device processing and BrainChip hold the ace in that regard.