This AI chip startup bagged $35 million to bring AI accelerator chips to market

Israel-based AI chip startup NeuReality has announced the raise of $35 million in a Series A funding round to commercialize its NR1 chip, which is designed to speed up artificial intelligence applications.

The funding round was led by Samsung Ventures, Cardumen Capital, Varana Capital, OurCrowd and XT Hi-Tech with participation from other funding partners.

Co-founded in 2019 by Tzvika Shmueli, Yossi Kasus and Tanach, NeuReality focuses on bringing to market AI hardware for cloud data centres and “edge” computers, or machines that run on-premises and do most of their data processing offline. The company has since raised a total of $48 million in funding over 3 rounds to date per TechCrunch.

NeuReality developed the NR1, a network-attached “server on a chip” with an embedded AI inferencing accelerator that is designed to perform AI inference processes, which is where AI systems generate outputs (e.g., text, images, audio) based on what they learned while “training” on a specific set of data.

According to the company, the NR1 can power a variety of AI workloads ranging from natural language processing models to product recommendation engines.

Alongside the NR1, NeuReality provides a set of software tools designed to simplify the task of deploying AI applications in production. The startup’s tools also promise to ease application management. NeuReality’s software portfolio includes, among other components, a so-called AI hypervisor that helps customers manage machine learning applications deployed on NR1 chips.

As the growing demand for AI, particularly generative AI, continues to supercharge the AI inferencing chip market, NeuReality, looks to cop a significant stake in the AI chip inferencing market by differentiating itself from competitors through its suite of software offerings and services to support its hardware.

The company says that the new funding will be put toward finalizing the design of NeuReality’s flagship AI inferencing chip in early 2023 and shipping it to customers.