Five AI chip startups that VCs love

No doubt about it, the AI chip market is big and about to get bigger. With the rise in demand for smart everything—from cars and homes to cities—Allied Market Research projects the global I chip market to grow from $6.64B in 2018 to $91.18B by 2025. That’s a CAGR of 45.2% over the forecast period.

And funding in the market continues apace. VentureBeat reported in January “According to 2019 data from the National Venture Capital Association, 1,356 AI-related companies in the U.S. raised $18.457 billion.That topped the 1,281 companies that raised $16.8 billion in 2018.”

Top funded AI chip startups chart 2020

Coming up alongside the AI industry behemoths—including AMD, NVIDIA, Google, Intel, and Qualcomm—is a slew of startups that are getting in the game with their own unique offerings.

Top funded chip startup company Graphcore is a semiconductor firm, which has developed an intelligence processing unit (IPU) that is specifically designed for AI applications.  

Palo Alo-based SambaNova Systems, a stealth startup, has received over $450 million to build a net-generation AI computing system of hardware and software.

Cerebras Systems' Wafer Scale Engine—the world's largest computer chip—is at the heart of its deep learning systems, enabling AI research at unprecedented speeds and scale.

Mythic is focused on machine learning inference. Its IPUs leverage analog computing by performing the calculations required for the inference stage of deep neural networks inside a flash memory array.

Groq offers an alternative platform for machine learning that is not dependent on the performance limitations of GPU parallelism and long latency, offering a superior inference platform with no performance penalty for small batch sizes or workloads of any size.

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