Chip startup founded by Krishna Rangasayee, raises $70 million to quicken AI on cars and robots

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Silicon Valley chip startup SiMa.ai raised $70 million in a funding round led by Maverick Capital to develop chips designed to speed up AI applications within everyday consumer devices from cameras to cars.

Point72 and Jericho joined the venture firm in the financing along with existing backers Amplify Partners, Dell Technologies Capital and Fidelity Management. The San Jose firm, which has now raised $270 million in total, designs processors that aim to help devices understand what they see or hear in the world and then convert that data into text, speech or video content.

SiMa.ai is one of a growing number of startups trying to perfect hardware for a future where AI is mainstream. Founded in 2018, it counts Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. director Moshe Gavrielov and Intel Corp. board member Lip‑Bu Tan among its own board members.

SiMa.ai’s chips do not target AI training, where high-end processors such as Nvidia Corp.’s chips teach artificial intelligence models things like what’s a dog or a cat, or build services like ChatGPT. The startup is instead focused on inference, where the AI model on devices identifies objects.

The startup has enlisted more than 50 customers for its first chip, which mainly targeted computer vision, and is now working on a second generation, said Krishna Rangasayee, SiMa.ai’s founder and chief executive. The new chip is scheduled for release in the first quarter of next year.

“We are now combining all this modality so that you could look at all of it. You could speak, you could touch, you could feel. And we’re kind of mimicking human capability,” he said about the startup’s new chip.

While Nvidia’s software is now the standard for much global AI development, Rangasayee said the tools on devices were open-source, used by 10,000-plus different business customers around the world. SiMa.ai’s products support various types of open standards including Linux and OpenCL.

The company now relies on TSMC to fabricate its chips. VentureTech Alliance, which has a strategic partnership with the Taiwanese chipmaker, is an investor in SiMa.ai.

“We really call ourselves a software company that builds their own silicon,” said Rangasayee.