In-memory AI startup EnCharge raises another US$22.6 million

Business news | December 5, 2023

By Peter Clarke

AI startup EnCharge AI Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.) has raised US$22.6 million in a round of funding to help it pursue charge-based in-memory AI computing.

This brings the amount raised by the company, founded in 2022, to about US$45 million (see EnCharge raises Series A for charge-based AI).

VentureTech Alliance, the venture capital company associated with foundry TSMC, is a new investor joining RTX Ventures, ACVC Partners, Anzu Partners, S5V, Alley Corp, Scout and Silicon Catalyst Angels.

The money will be used to expand the company’s workforce, which currently stands as 50 employees located in the US, Canada and Germany. It will also be used to bring out AI chips and ‘full-stack’ solutions based on those chips.

The company was co-founded in March 2022 by Kailash Gopalakrishnan, Naveen Verma and Echere Iroaga to build on R&D performed at Princeton University. Gopalakrishnan is chief technology officer, Verma is CEO and Iroaga is COO.

Verma has been a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Princeton University and Gopalakrishnan was formerly an IBM Fellow and led IBM’s AI hardware and software programs. Iroaga has 25 years of semiconductor experience including senior management roles at Macom and Qualcomm, where he served as director of engineering.

EnCharge’s uses charge-based, in-memory computing technology that was initially developed under DARPA and Department of Defense funded programs and matured over the last six years.

The company claims it can achieve orders-of-magnitude higher compute efficiency and density than has been achieved GPUs or TPUs or ‘beyond-digital’ accelerators, such as those based on optical or analog computing.

The company states it has several generations of test chips and has achieved 150TOPS/W for 8bit AI compute.