By Max A. Cherney
SAN FRANCISCO, July 1 (Reuters) - Artificial intelligence startup Oxmiq said on Wednesday it raised $35 million from investors in order to build chip design architecture and software that will lower the cost of building and running AI applications.
Developing a cutting-edge AI chip can cost hundreds of millions of dollars and take several years to make the requisite silicon design plans and necessary software to support it. Oxmiq's goal is to collapse three distinct components of an AI system
and combine them into a single block of IP that it can license, Chief Executive Raja Koduri said in an interview.
Typically, AI systems are divided between graphics chips and central processors. Oxmiq plans to combine both, along with a third component, a tensor engine, into a single design, he said.
"We would want to be the Arm of this next era," Koduri said, referring to the U.K. company that supplies the design and IP for nearly every smartphone in the world.
The company also plans to develop a computing fabric that includes chiplets — several specific chips combined to form a complete system — and memory within a single package.
The former Intel chief architect and an ex-AMD executive, Koduri said that Oxmiq will also get into the custom chip market, where Broadcom, Marvell and MediaTek compete.
Oxmiq plans to use the $35 million to finish the first batch of intellectual property it is working on and make it available as a product, Koduri said. The company also plans to hire more engineers as it scales its business.
The Campbell, California, company has raised a total of $60 million, the company said. The $35 million funding round included investors such as Taiwan's MediaTek and Pegatron Venture Capital. Samsung Catalyst Fund and Fudomo led the round.
(Reporting by Max A. Cherney in San FranciscoEditing by Nick Zieminski)
