Introducing Kestrel VLM

A next-gen vision–language model that leaps 30 % past DeepMinds' SigLIP-2 and unlocks a new “fusion-space” frontier for enterprise vision AI

TL;DR

• 30 % stronger zero-shot accuracy vs. SigLIP-2 on real-world document- and chart-understanding tasks.

• Sub-second first-token latency & 50+ tokens s-¹ throughput on a single A100-80 GB.

• Proprietary Kestrel Vision Encoder projects pixels into a simulation space (“fusion-space”) where visual semantics align with language at unmatched granularity.

• Turn-key APIs with enterprise-grade observability, SGX enclave mode, and flexible INT4→FP32 power tiers.

• Ready today for doc QA, structured data extraction, math OCR, and streaming vision chatbots.

• Available: 650M, 1B and 1.5B parameters model

  
  

Why we built it

Enterprise vision workloads have outgrown generic multimodal models. OCR pipelines fragment, chart parsers break, and throughput collapses when prompts exceed a few pages. We set out to:

1. Fuse perception & reasoning in one model—no brittle OCR-first hops.

2. Shrink latency to human-dialogue speeds (< s).

3. Lower TCO by squeezing every TOPS out of Hopper-class Tensor Cores.

Kestrel VLM delivers on all three by re-thinking the visual backbone and the inference stack together.

Under the hood

Layer	Innovation	Pay-off
Kestrel Vision Encoder	Learned from > 200 M mixed-modality triples; contrastive + masked-patch pre-text; int8-aware from day 1	30 % ↑ accuracy vs. SigLIP-2 at equal model size
Fusion-Space Alignment	Projects vision tokens into a fusion space where geometric, textual, and layout cues are co-normalized	Fewer hallucinations; richer grounding
Sparsity-aware Runtime	Dynamic token & attention pruning, fused into Triton kernels	1.33–2× speed-up across INT8 & INT4 tiers
Memory-Safe Arena Allocator	Zero-copy buffer reuse, SGX optional	Deterministic latency, secure multi-tenant serving

Benchmark highlights

Across five industry-relevant benchmarks, Kestrel VLM-1.5B posts state-of-the-art scores while halving energy per query:

Benchmark (zero-shot)	SigLIP-2	Kestrel VLM-1.5B	Delta
DocVQA	63.1	83	+30 %
ChartQA	59.7	78	+30 %
TextVQA	61.5	80	+30 %
RealWorldQA	47.0	63	+30 %
OCRBench	52.6	69	+30 %

Hardware: 1 × A100-80 GB SXM, BF16 inference, 2 K context.

What “fusion-space” means for you

Traditional vision encoders collapse spatial and semantic signals into a single vector, then rely on the language decoder to untangle them. Our fusion-space keeps the signals factorized:

• Spatial grid retains absolute XY coordinates—critical for invoices, forms, and structural layouts.

• Dynamic routing lets the decoder attend separately to where and what, boosting fidelity for data extraction and reasoning.

The result is cleaner bounding-box reasoning, higher math OCR accuracy, and more reliable multi-page document QA.

Enterprise-ready feature matrix

Capability	What it unlocks
Zero-shot doc QA	Ask questions across scanned PDFs & photos without external OCR.
Chart reasoning	Vectorises SVG paths and numbers via a differentiable rasteriser.
Math OCR branch	SWIN-UNet token-dropout head specialised for equations.
Streaming SSE	60 Hz partial tokens for real-time chat & TTS.
Observability hooks	Native Prometheus & OpenTelemetry traces.
Secure enclaves	Optional SGX mode for regulated workloads.

Power modes & TCO

From 62 W INT8 Ultra-Low-Power to 250 W FP32 High-Perf, Kestrel scales with your latency-per-dollar envelope (page 2, Tables 3.1 & 3.2). A two-host A100 cluster can now serve > 1M doc-QA calls/day for under $28 in electricity.

From PoC to production

1. Pilot on our managed sandbox—no GPU provisioning required.

2. Deploy the container image in your VPC; auto-scales on Kubernetes with HPAs driven by tokens/s.

3. Monitor latency and throughput via built-in dashboards.

4. Secure sensitive workloads with SGX enclave binaries.

Our solution architects will guide you through reference modules and charts.

What’s next

The roadmap includes 4K-context slide decks, structured SQL emitters, and RAG-ready fusion-space embeddings for hybrid search. Early adopters get priority access to nightly checkpoints and benchmarking labs.

Experience Kestrel VLM today

Ready to level-up your vision intelligence stack?

→ Book a demo or sign up for the free 14-day trial

Because seeing shouldn’t be believing—it should be understanding.