SiMa.ai Secures $70M Funding for Next-Gen GenAI Chip
The funding round, led by Maverick Capital and joined by Point72 and Jericho, underscores investor confidence in SiMa.ai's vision and capabilities.
SiMa.ai, a Silicon Valley-based startup specializing in embedded machine learning (ML) system-on-chip (SoC) platforms, has secured an additional $70 million in funding to advance its efforts in bringing its second-generation chipset to market. Led by Maverick Capital, this oversubscribed round brings SiMa.ai's total funding to $270 million.
The new chip is tailored to address the growing demand for multimodal generative AI processing at the edge, empowering devices such as robots, drones, diagnostic machines, and autonomous vehicles to facilitate more collaborative human-machine interactions. The company's edge AI SoC targets various sectors, including industrial manufacturing, retail, aerospace, defense, agriculture, and healthcare.
SiMa.ai's first ML SoC launched to deliver AI and ML through an integrated software-hardware combination, has already been adopted by over 50 companies worldwide. Notably, the current generation of ML SoC achieved the highest FPS/W results on the MLPerf benchmark across multiple categories. Building on this success, the upcoming second-generation ML SoC will provide multimodal GenAI capability, adaptable to any framework, network, model, and sensor. It will serve as a unified platform for AI across computer vision, transformers, and multimodal GenAI applications.
Krishna Rangasayee, Founder and CEO at SiMa.ai, emphasized the transformative impact of AI, particularly generative AI, on reshaping the collaboration between humans and machines. He highlighted the significance of equipping edge devices with capabilities such as sight, sound, and speech, which the next-generation MLSoC from SiMa.ai aims to deliver.
With Taiwan's TSMC as its manufacturing partner and Arm Holdings as the provider for its compute subsystem, SiMa.ai is well-positioned to develop cutting-edge AI chipsets. The company's second-generation chipset, based on TSMC's 6nm process technology, will incorporate Synopsys EV74 embedded vision processors for computer vision applications.
Andrew Homan, Senior Managing Director at Maverick Capital, expressed excitement about partnering with SiMa.ai, recognizing the company's best-in-class team, cutting-edge technology, and forward momentum. He underscored SiMa.ai's pivotal role in helping customers navigate the transformative shift toward edge AI.
The funding round, led by Maverick Capital and joined by Point72 and Jericho, underscores investor confidence in SiMa.ai's vision and capabilities. With a total of $270 million raised to date, SiMa.ai plans to expand its team, enhance its R&D capabilities, and scale its customer-facing operations globally.
