Israeli AI hopeful raises $27 million
NeuroBlade (Hod-Hasharon, Israel) was founded in 2017 by Elad Sity, CEO and Eliad Hillel, CTO, and raised $4.5 million in seed capital while in stealth mode from StageOne Ventures and Grove Ventures. The $23 million Series A therefore brings the total raised by NeuroBlade to more than $27 million.
The money will be used increase the number of employees and ramp up marketing efforts as the company brings its AI chip to market.
Sity and Hillel are both graduates of the technological unit of Israel’s Intelligence Corps and formerly key employees of SolarEdge Technologies Inc. a provider of solar inverter, monitoring solutions and power optimization technology for photovoltaic arrays.
The market for AI chips is becoming more crowded as startups develop processors for different market segments on top of large corporations that are developing processors for their own needs. AI chips are used today in image and speech recognition, video analysis, autonomous driving and many more applications.
NeuroBlade’s AI chip is intended to run several neural networks and multiple complex algorithms at the same time. The company claims its chip is able to maintain strong performance despite being smaller and less expensive to make that competitors’ products.
“We started out slightly over two years ago with an ambitious idea how to solve AI’s computational challenges,” said Sity, in a statement. “I would like to thank the investors and partners who share the excitement and faith in our product and the way to get there.”
Tal Slobodkin, partner at StageOne VC, commented: “The chip developed by NeuroBlade will allow running AI algorithms on par with the performance of market-leading chips but at a smaller size or with significantly better performance at similar throughput and size. NeuroBlade’s technology targets servers and is also relevant to end devices, such as security cameras, laptops, cars, multimedia and more.”
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