AI computing provider EnCharge AI has raked in £18 million ($21.7m) in a Series A funding round to develop its advanced AI hardware and software for edge computing.
The round, EnCharge’s first form of public funding, was led by Anzu Partners with participation from AlleyCorp, Alumni Ventures, Scout Ventures, and more.
Incubated at Princeton University, EnCharge’s in-memory compute technology is the result of six years of research and development driven by Department of Defence funding.
CEO Naveen Verma has said EnCharge’s semiconductor hardware and software stack can deliver 15 times the performance of competitors operating in low-power environments. This is achieved through a processor that works as a highly programmable integrated circuit with a unique approach to memory management.
“We believe that EnCharge’s technology is the only robust and scalable form of next-generation in-memory computing. Following this Series A round, EnCharge is now positioned to develop products to engage with customer applications in production at the forefront of AI,” Verma said.
The company currently has a team of around 25 employees with backgrounds at top computing firms like AMD, NVIDIA, IBM, and Intel.
“They have been there and done that with more traditional accelerators,” Verma said. “They’re the kind of people who can break the rules while building rigorous, industrial-strength hardware.”
EnCharge AI says its tests have shown chips and hardware can achieve over 150 trillion operations per second per watt for 8-bit compute precision, making them 15x more efficient than the 10 trillion operations per second of today’s technologies.
With its Series A funding, the company plans to commercialise its products and make advanced edge computing with AI more accessible.
“In order to keep pace with the incredible innovations we are seeing in AI, we need fundamentally new ways of computing,” Verma added. “This requires differentiated technologies, but which are also extensively validated and refined across the entire stack for real-world operation.
Jimmy Kan, a partner at Anzu Partners, said: “As edge AI continues to drive business automation, there is huge demand for sustainable technologies that can provide dramatic improvements in end-to-end AI inference capability along with cost and power efficiency. EnCharge’s technology addresses these challenges.”
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