This DARPA-backed startup banked $100 million for its energy-slashing analog chips
A young DARPA-backed startup with a fresh spin on a low-power computer chip has raised over $100 million in a Series B funding round, a sign of the wild appetite for more energy-efficient ways to build bigger and better AI.
The company, EnCharge AI, aims to move AI’s heaviest workloads from big, power-hungry data centers to devices at the edge, including laptops and mobile devices, where energy, size, and cost constraints are tighter. Its approach, known as analog in-memory computing, comes from research that CEO Naveen Verma spun out of his lab at Princeton University, where he’s still a professor of electrical and computer engineering.
Verma wouldn’t say who its customers are. But in addition to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which gave it $18.6 million last year, a who’s who of industrial, electronics, and defense players are interested in EnCharge’s chips. The oversubscribed funding round, led by Tiger Global, includes the intelligence community’s investment unit In-Q-Tel, alongside the venture arms of defense giant RTX, power producer Constellation Energy, South Korea’s Samsung, and Taiwan’s Hon Hai (Foxconn). The Santa Clara, California-based startup is also working with semiconductor giant Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) to produce its first-generation chips.