- Maverick Capital leads funding round, Point72 participates
- SiMa.ai’s board includes directors from Intel and TSMC
SiMa.ai, a Silicon Valley–based startup producing embedded machine learning (ML) system-on-chip (SoC) platforms, today announced that it has raised a $70 million extension funding round as it plans to bring its second-generation chipset, specifically built for multimodal generative AI processing, to market.
According to Gartner, the market for AI-supporting chips globally is forecast to more than double by 2027 to $119.4 billion compared to 2023. However, only a few players have started producing dedicated semiconductors for AI applications. Most of the prominent contenders initially focused on supporting AI in the cloud. Nonetheless, various reports predicted a significant growth in the market of AI on the edge, which means the hardware processing AI computations are closer to the data gathering source than in a centralized cloud. SiMa.ai, named after “seema,” the Hindi word for “boundary,” strives to leverage this shift by offering its edge AI SoC to organizations across industrial manufacturing, retail, aerospace, defense, agriculture and healthcare sectors.
The San Jose–headquartered startup, which targets the market segment between 5W and 25W of energy usage, launched its first ML SoC to bring AI and ML through an integrated software-hardware combination. This includes its proprietary chipset and no-code software called Palette. The combination has already been used by over 50 companies globally, Krishna Rangasayee, the founder and CEO of SiMa.ai, told TechCrunch.
The startup touts that its current generation of the ML SoC delivered the highest FPS/W results on the MLPerf benchmark across the MLPerf Inference 4.0 closed, edge and power division categories. However, the first-generation chipset was focused on classic computer vision.
As the demand for GenAI is growing, SiMa.ai is set to introduce its second-generation ML SoC in the first quarter of 2025 with an emphasis on providing its customers with multimodal GenAI capability. The new SoC will be an “evolutionary change” over its predecessor with “a few architectural tunings” over the existing ML chipset, Rangasayee said. He added that the fundamental concepts would remain the same.
The new GenAI SoC would adapt to any framework, network, model and sensor — similar to the company’s existing ML platform — and will also be compatible with any modality, including audio, speech, text and image. It would work as a single-edge platform for all AI across computer vision, transformers and multimodal GenAI, the startup said.
The founder continued that SiMa.ai delivers higher performance and better power efficiency than Hailo. He also said SiMa.ai’s system software is quite different and effective for GenAI.
“As long as we’re solving customer problems, and we are better at doing that than anybody else, we are in a good place,” he said.
SiMa.ai’s fresh all-equity funding, led by Maverick Capital and with participation from Point72 and Jericho, extends the startup’s $30 million Series B round, initially announced in May 2022. Existing investors, including Amplify Partners, Dell Technologies Capital, Fidelity Management and Lip-Bu Tan also participated in the additional investment. With this fundraising, the five-year-old startup has raised a total of $270 million.
The company currently has 160 employees, 65 of whom are at its R&D center in Bengaluru, India. SiMa.ai plans to grow that headcount by adding new roles and extending its R&D capability. It also wants to develop a go-to-market team for Indian customers. Further, the startup plans to scale its customer-facing teams globally, starting with Korea and Japan and in Europe and the U.S.
“The computational intensity of generative AI has precipitated a paradigm shift in data center architecture. The next phase in this evolution will be widespread adoption of AI at the edge. Just as the data center has been revolutionized, the edge computing landscape is poised for a complete transformation. SiMa.ai possesses the essential trifecta of a best-in-class team, cutting-edge technology, and forward momentum, positioning it as a key player for customers traversing this tectonic shift. We’re excited to join forces with SiMa.ai to seize this once-in-a-generation opportunity,” said Andrew Homan, senior managing director at Maverick Capital, in a statement.
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