Recogni appears to have defied the trend of startup chipmakers this year, as the majority have not received much support from investors thus far.
The company, located in San Jose, California, is creating an AI inference chip for the generative AI and automotive sectors. Celesta Capital and GreatPoint Ventures are leading the $102 million Series C round for the company. Along with new investors Pledge Ventures and Tasaru Mobility Investments, existing investors Mayfield, DNS Capital, BMW i Ventures, and SW Mobility Fund also took part. The lender was HSBC Innovation Banking.
The company is currently investigating the AI sector, even though its initial focus was on creating chips that assist self-driving cars in detecting objects. According to the business, its accelerator chip requires less energy and makes predictions using real-time data in trained models.
“The critical need for solutions that directly address the key challenges in AI inference processing — compute capability, scalability, accuracy and energy savings — is more urgent than ever,” said CEO Marc Bolitho. “Recogni is leading this transformative wave, engineering pivotal advances that will redefine data centers and enterprise, and revolutionize industries like automotive and aerospace.”
Chip Financing
Despite the demand for innovative chip designs due to businesses like artificial intelligence and the automotive sector, U.S.-based semiconductor funding has decreased in recent quarters.
According to Crunchbase data, these businesses made only $1.2 billion in 66 deals this year, compared to over $2 billion in 2022.
Only a few deals have been made this year, which doesn’t seem to be promising for the industry to experience a significant uptick until about two months into 2024.