Canada-based artificial intelligence (AI) chipmaker Untether AI has emerged from stealth with a $13m series A round led by Intel Capital, the corporate venture capital subsidiary of semiconductor technology provider Intel.
The other participants in the round were not named. Untether had already raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from undisclosed investors in November 2018.
Founded in 2018, Untether AI is developing high-performance chips that can power AI applications such as autonomous vehicles, data centers and vision processing.
The chips are designed to move data 1,000-times faster than traditional models, while reducing the distance required for data to travel and eliminating the cost of moving data to processors, which reduces energy consumption.
Dave Flanagan, senior managing director of Intel Capital, said: “In under five months after a small initial seed investment, Untether AI was able to build a successful prototype based on a processing-near-memory architecture that promises to enable dramatically higher efficiencies and performance for AI accelerators.
“This is a team with decades of experience in chip design, and they are now developing a commercial product for neural net inference – in an AI inference market that is projected to grow to $22 billion by 2022.”