Startup chip designer building brain-inspired hardware for artificial intelligence algorithms Rain Neuromorphics Inc. announced having raised $25 million from its recently held funding round. This financing round was led by Prosperity 7 Ventures, a venture capital fund of Aramco ventures.
The company’s CEO, Gordon Wilson, says their AI chips are analogue while most of the AI chips on the market today are digital.
Digital chips read 1s and 0s while analogue chips can decipher incremental information such as sound waves.
“It’s about looking at the brain first for clues to inform how we can build a new substrate of computation. By building neural circuits, we can achieve extraordinary efficiency and extraordinary scale simultaneously,” added the CEO who is also the company’s co-founder.
The CEO says they will be using the funds to expand the company’s engineering team and take its prototype chip to the next stage of development.
“Rain’s chip is designed by adding a circuit called a memristor on top of silicon wafers. Memristors, originally designed by HP Labs about a decade ago, serve as ‘artificial synapses’ that allow for the processing and memory to happen in the same place, making it possible to run AI algorithms much faster and more energy-efficiently than existing digital AI chips,” added the CEO.
