EnCharge AI raises $100m from Samsung, Foxconn
Analog in-memory compute startup EnCharge AI has raised $100m from some key industry investors to bring its accelerator chip and boards to market this year.
The oversubscribed Series B round, led by Tiger Global, brings the total raised to $144m. New investors in the round include Samsung Ventures as well as HH-CTBC, a partnership between Hon Hai Technology Group (the Foxconn contract manufacturer) and CTBC venture capital. Last month Samsung Ventures also backed neural sensor startup Pison.
These partners give the company key routes to market for the company for M.2 and PCI Express cards in servers based on its system on chip and compute chiplets.
EnCharge AI’s noise-resilient analog in-memory compute architecture reduces the power requirements of running conventional and generative AI inference workloads by integrating highly efficient analog processing and memory together,
“EnCharge has achieved something revolutionary while having comprehensively derisked their technology through research at Princeton before the company was even launched,” said a Managing Director at Samsung Ventures. “Building on multiple generations of chips encompassing seven years of peer-reviewed research, Naveen and his team are ready to commercialize a complete hardware and software solution that can bring advanced AI out of the cloud and onto consumer devices.”
The funding will also be used to take the design to lower process technologies than the current 16nm and develop parts for edge AI as well as the datacentre.
The round also includes notable strategic investors in defence and industrial technology, reflecting the broad applicability of EnCharge’s innovations across industries. In-Q-Tel (IQT) is a not-for-profit strategic investor in technologies for the US national security community and America’s allies, while RTX Ventures is the venture capital arm of RTX, a manufacturer of aerospace and defence systems. Constellation Technology Ventures, the venture capital arm of Constellation, the largest producer of clean, emissions-free energy in the US.
“The efficiency breakthrough of EnCharge AI’s analog in-memory architecture can be transformative for defence and aerospace use cases where size, weight, and power constraints limit how AI is deployed today,” said Dan Ateya, President and Managing Director of RTX Ventures. “Continuing our collaboration with EnCharge AI will help enable AI advancements in environments that were previously inaccessible given the limitations of current processor technology.”
Other new investors include Maverick Silicon, Capital TEN, SIP Global Partners, Zero Infinity Partners, Vanderbilt University and Morgan Creek Digital. Previous investors participating in the round include RTX Ventures, Anzu Partners, Scout Ventures, AlleyCorp, ACVC, and S5V.
CEO interview: Charge-based in memory compute at Encharge AI
“When evaluating EnCharge AI, we looked at and beyond their initial product plans and considered how this technology will continue to develop in the future,” said Manish Muthal, Senior Managing Director at Maverick Silicon. “We were excited by the opportunity EnCharge has to rapidly bring products to market while continuing to achieve efficiency gains with their technology, raising the bar of AI compute efficiency to a place that would be difficult for others to reach.”
“Our Series B is a pivotal milestone for the company that signals our readiness to bring our full stack AI solutions to market in 2025,” said Naveen Verma, CEO and co-founder of EnCharge.
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