ai-chip
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DEEPX
DEEPX is a South Korean fabless semiconductor startup building ultra-low-power neural processing units (NPUs) for on-device and edge AI. Founded in 2018 by former Apple chip designer Lokwon Kim, the company designs AI accelerators - led by its 25 TOPS DX-M1 chip - that run vision and generative AI models at under 5 watts, aiming to move intelligence out of the data center and into robots, cameras, factories, mobility and everyday devices. It raised an $80.5M Series C in 2024 at a $529M valuation and positions itself as a 'Physical AI infrastructure company.'
Applied Brain Research
Applied Brain Research (ABR) is a Waterloo, Ontario AI hardware company spun out of the University of Waterloo's Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience. It builds brain-inspired chips and software that run real-time AI - full-vocabulary speech recognition, text-to-speech and sensor processing - directly on edge devices at power levels measured in milliwatts. Its patented state-space models and the Legendre Memory Unit power the TSP1 Time Series Processor, which ABR calls the world's first single-chip solution for full-vocabulary speech recognition, doing the work of cloud voice AI while consuming 10 to 100 times less power.
Kevin Conley
Kevin Conley is the CEO of Applied Brain Research (ABR), the Waterloo-based startup commercializing brain-inspired, ultra-low-power chips for edge AI. A 30-plus-year semiconductor veteran, he spent more than two decades at SanDisk - rising to Senior Vice President and CTO - then led Everspin Technologies as President and CEO. He is named on 90+ patents covering non-volatile memory architecture and management.
Arago
Arago is a Paris and Palo Alto deeptech startup building a photonic AI accelerator that uses light instead of electrons to run AI workloads, targeting 10x lower energy consumption than today's leading GPUs at equivalent performance and cost while staying compatible with PyTorch and standard hardware ecosystems.
EnCharge AI
EnCharge AI is a Santa Clara semiconductor startup, spun out of Princeton University, building AI accelerator chips based on analog in-memory computing. Its charge-based architecture runs heavy AI workloads on laptops, workstations and edge devices at roughly 20x the energy efficiency of conventional GPUs. Its first product, the EN100 accelerator, delivers 200+ TOPS within an 8.25W power budget, aiming to move generative AI out of the data center and onto the devices people actually hold.
Etched
Etched is an American semiconductor startup building Sohu, an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) designed to run only one thing: transformer models. By burning the transformer architecture directly into silicon, Etched claims an 8-chip Sohu server can match the throughput of 160 Nvidia H100 GPUs on Llama-70B inference. Founded in 2022 by three Harvard dropouts, the company has raised over $625M, including a recent $500M round at a reported $5B valuation.