– Axelera AI announced that it has successfully closed a seed investment round of $12m.
– The round was led by Bitfury and joined by global nanoelectronics R&D center imec and deep-tech venture capital funds Innovation Industries and imec.xpand.
– The funding will support the company’s development of an industry-defining product powering AI applications at the edge.
– Axelera AI was incubated by Bitfury Group in 2019, formerly operating as Bitfury AI until the company came out as an independent entity this year.
– Building on its extensive research and development focused on integrating world-class hardware and software technologies for edge and cloud-to-edge enterprise solutions, Axelera AI joined forces with imec in early 2020 to develop groundbreaking computing architecture for high-performance AI.

– Axelera AI, a Dutch AI semiconductor startup, emerged from stealth with $12m in seed funding led by Bitfury, a security and infrastructure provider for the Bitcoin blockchain.
– Innovation Industries Fund participated in the round, which the company says will support developing of AI apps at the edge.
– Edge AI, the processing of AI algorithms on devices like drones, digital signage, cameras, and sensors, derives from edge computing, which starts from the same premise: Data is processed and managed at internet of things endpoints.
– Edge AI is advantageous in industries like retail, robotics, and manufacturing, where it can deliver lower latency than sending data to remote servers — and avoid disruptions and costs in the process.
– Incubated by Bitfury, Axelera says it’s developing a chipset to accelerate AI and machine learning algorithms at the edge.

– ZeroPoint Technologies, a Gothenburg, Sweden-based company focused on memory compression available, raised €2.5M in Seed funding.
– The round was led by Nordic VC Industrifonden.
– The company intends to use the funds to grow their customer base in North America and Asia Pacific, develop new products, and expand its engineering team in Sweden.

– VisIC Technologies, a Ness Ziona, Israel-based world leader in GaN electronics for xEV applications, focused on high-power automotive solutions, raised $35M in funding.
– The round was led by GoldenSand Capital and HG Semiconductors through Fast Semi Corporation.
– SuZhou industrial partner joined the round as a co-investor with an additional $10M.
– The company intends to use the funds to expand operations and its business reach.

– Forefront RF is a fabless semiconductor company based in Cambridge, UK.
– The company raised £1.5m in funding.
– The round was led by Science Creates Ventures with participation from Foresight Williams Technology, BGF, and The Cambridge Angels.
– The new investment will be used to expand the team and accelerate the launch of its products.

– Wiliot announced that it received $200m in a Series C funding round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2.
– Wiliot has created a platform that is built on Wiliot IoT Pixels and the Wiliot Cloud.
– Wiliot IoT Pixels are tiny low-cost, self-powered tags that attach to any product or packaging to sense a range of physical and environment data that is then fed into the Wiliot Cloud, where machine learning algorithms translate data into actionable insights for businesses across a range of industries.
– The Wiliot Cloud also ensures data remains secure, private, and authentic.
– For decades, there has remained a massive gap as trillions of products travel billions of miles without any data being available as to their status, whereabouts, or situation.

– Phononic from Durham, NC develops semiconductor cooling solutions.
– Goldman Sachs Asset Management Sustainable Investing business made a $50m growth funding.
– The new investment will be used to expand sales and marketing, domestic and international high-volume manufacturing capabilities, and expand its cooling and refrigeration product portfolio and platform.

– Untether AI, a startup developing custom-built chips for AI inferencing workloads, announced it has raised $125 million from Tracker Capital Management and Intel Capital.
– The round, which was oversubscribed and included participation from Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Radical Ventures, will be used to support customer expansion.
– Increased use of AI — along with the technology’s hardware requirements — poses a challenge for traditional datacenter compute architectures.
– Untether is among the companies proposing at-memory or near-memory computation as a solution.
– Essentially, this type of hardware builds memory and logic into an integrated circuit package.
– In a “2.5D” near-memory compute architecture, processor dies are stacked atop an interposer that links the components and the board, incorporating high-speed memory to bolster chip bandwidth.

– Ascenium, Inc. has secured a new Series A investment of $16m from Ascenium Holding AS.
– This cash infusion brings the total investment in the semiconductor innovator to $25m.
– The company aims to substantially grow the team size to support its ongoing development efforts.
– Ascenium’s Aptos, first in a new class of Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) free general-purpose processors, will disrupt data center computing while addressing energy efficiency requirements in today’s data centers.
– For the first time in more than 50 years, Ascenium will radically redefine the interface between the compiler and the hardware in general-purpose processors.

– SiLC Technologies announced a $17m Series A funding round led by Alter Venture Partners and Dell Technologies Capital.
– The round was also supported by Fluxunit – OSRAM Ventures, Sony Innovation Fund by IGV, Epson, UMC Capital, Yamato Holdings and Global Brain.
– The additional financing will be used to expand SiLC’s operations, accelerate product development and gain additional production design wins – all in preparation for pre-production and product launch activities.
– Over the last year, SiLC has provided development systems to customers that are at the forefront of their respective market segments, including mobility, industrial machine vision, robotics, augmented reality, and consumer applications.
– The new funds will help further customer traction and support bringing these products to market.

– Tenstorrent is a hardware startup developing next generation computers whose Grayskull processor will go to market in the second half of 2021.
– The company raised over $200M in funding round at a $1b valuation.
– The round was led by Fidelity Management and Research Company with participation from Eclipse Ventures, Epic CG and Moore Capital.
– The new investment will be used to continue creating AI focused hardware for developers.

– oneNav announced that it has closed a $21m Series B funding round, led by GV, with participation from Norwest Venture Partners and GSR Ventures.
– The company also unveiled the world’s first pure L5 mobile GNSS receiver, which provides the highest location accuracy with half the footprint of existing solutions.
– Further validating the company’s unique mobile offering, oneNav has signed a strategic partnership agreement with In-Q-Tel Inc., providing U.S. intelligence and defense agencies with a first-of-a-kind GNSS technology solution.

– Agile Analog is a UK-based supplier of configurable process node agnostic analog IP building blocks.
– The company closed a US$19m funding round.
– The round was led by Omers Ventures with participation from existing investors Delin Ventures, firstminute capital, and MMC Ventures.
– The new investment will be used to accelerate the growth of its commercial and engineering support teams, to open a Taiwan office for sales and application engineering staff serving the Asian market, to further enhance process support, and to increase the range of analog IP supported.

– Groq announced closing $300m in Series C fundraising.
– The round was led by Tiger Global Management and D1 Capital, with participation from The Spruce House Partnership, Addition, GCM Grosvenor, Xⁿ, Firebolt Ventures, General Global Capital, and Tru Arrow Partners.
– The round brings Groq’s total funding to $367m.
– By maintaining capital efficiency, this latest funding allows Groq to grow across industries while elevating the company’s efforts to hire top talent and accelerating its next-generation products in development.
– According to multiple published analyst reports, the total available market for AI semiconductors is projected to reach $65bn to $100bn by 2025.

– ePIC Blockchain Technologies Inc. announced the completion of its Series A funding round for USD 7.5m.
– Fort Capital Partners advised ePIC in the evaluation and structure of the offering.
– The proceeds from this raise, along with early customer orders, will be used to fund the prototyping and pre-production costs of ePIC’s third mining rig. Code-named “Amnesia”, this ASIC has been in development since early 2020 and is expected to launch in Q4 2021.
– With over $1 billion raised by publicly listed miners during the last 6 months, plans have been announced for an aggregate of 720MW of power capacity for North American datacenter and mining operations.
– North America is poised to become a leading provider of cryptocurrency mining hashrate.

– Flex Logix raised a $55M Series D financing round.
– The round was led by Mithril Capital Management with participation from existing investors Lux Capital, Eclipse Ventures, and the Tate Family Trust.
– Flex Logix’s inference architecture is unique. It is optimized for low latency operation required by edge megapixel vision applications.
– It combines numerous 1-dimensional tensor processors with reconfigurable, high bandwidth, non-blocking interconnect that enables each layer of the neural network model to be configured for maximum utilization, resulting in very high performance with less cost and power.
– The connections between compute and memory are reconfigured in millionths of a second as the model is processed.

– Xsight Labs announced the closing of its Series D funding.
– The round was led by Valor Equity Partners and Atreides Management and was joined by new investor Fidelity Management & Research Company.
– Existing investors Battery Ventures, Intel Capital, M12 Microsoft’s Venture Fund and Xilinx, increased their investments.
– Additionally, Accton Technology joined as a new strategic investor.
– Xsight Labs’ Series D was significantly oversubscribed and is the largest round ever raised by our group.
– Xsight Labs emerged from stealth in December 2020 and announced the sampling availability of X1, the industry’s first 25.6T data center switch with 100G PAM4 SerDes.

– Mobix Labs from Irvine, CA develops RF semiconductors for the 5G mmWave wireless market.
– The company closed $10m new funding as part of an extended seed round.
– The new investment will be used to continue to expand the company’s development efforts.

– Scalinx, a Paris, France-based fabless semiconductor company specialized in advanced signal conversion chips, secured €10.5m in funding.
– The round was led by WaterStart Capital, anotherventure, with participation from BNP Paribas Développement, CEN Innovation, and Unexo.
– The new investment will be used to meet market demand and further expand the team.