SiMa.ai Raises $70 Million to Bring Second-Generation Chipset to Market
Silicon Valley-based startup SiMa.ai has announced a successful $70 million extension funding round as they prepare to release their second-generation chipset designed for multimodal generative AI processing.
According to Gartner, the market for AI-supporting chips is expected to double by 2027, reaching a total of $119.4 billion. While many companies have focused on AI in the cloud, SiMa.ai plans to leverage the shift towards AI on the edge by offering their edge AI SoC to organizations across various industries, including industrial manufacturing, retail, aerospace, defense, agriculture, and healthcare.
The company’s first ML SoC, designed for energy usage between 5W-25W, has already been used by over 50 companies globally. SiMa.ai’s founder and CEO, Krishna Rangasayee, explains that their proprietary chipset and no-code software, called Palette, have been successful in providing AI and ML capabilities through an integrated software-hardware combination.
“You cannot predict the future, but you can pick the vector and say, hey, that’s the vector I want to bet on. And I want to continue evolving around my vector. That’s kind of the approach that we took architecturally. But fundamentally, we really haven’t walked away or had to drastically change our architecture. This is also the benefit of us taking a software-centric architecture that allows more flexibility and nimbleness.” – Krishna Rangasayee
The company’s first-generation chipset focused on classic computer vision, but with the growing demand for GenAI, they are set to release their second-generation ML SoC in the first quarter of 2025. This new SoC will have an “evolutionary change” from its predecessor, with a few architectural improvements and a stronger emphasis on providing customers with multimodal GenAI capabilities.
The new GenAI SoC will be adaptable to any framework, network, model, and sensor, and will be compatible with audio, speech, text, and image modalities. It will serve as a single-edge platform for all AI processing, including computer vision, transformers, and multimodal GenAI.
“Amongst all of our peers, Hailo has done a really good job. And it’s not us being better than them. But from our perspective, our value proposition is quite different.” – Krishna Rangasayee
SiMa.ai’s competitors include companies like NXP, Texas Instruments, STMicro, Renaissance and Microchip Technology, and Nvidia, along with other AI chip startups. However, Rangasayee believes that Nvidia is their main competitor in the market, as they have yet to build a platform for the edge. He also asserts that other AI chip startups do not solve system problems and only offer ML acceleration.
The latest round of funding, led by Maverick Capital and with participation from Point72 and Jericho, brings the total amount raised by the five-year-old startup to $270 million. SiMa.ai plans to use this funding to expand their R&D capabilities, grow their team, and develop a go-to-market strategy for Indian customers. They also plan to scale their customer-facing teams globally, starting with Korea and Japan and expanding to Europe and the United States.
“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.” – Andrew Homan