By Max A. Cherney
San Francisco (Reuters) – newly formed chip startup for Wednesday said it had collected $ 21.5 million in seed financing.
Partly founded by various former Intel (Intc) Central Processing Unit (CPU) engineers and managers, the company of Plan Technology and Chips is to build on the basis of the open source architecture called Risc-V, pronounced as “Risk Five”.
Progress of plans to use the funds to design and develop CPU technology that aims to resolve some of the computer performance problems that have arisen around artificial intelligence, such as bandwidth shortages and data processing limitations.
Co-founder and CEO Debbie Marr said it was a suitable moment for a startup that depends on RISC-V technology because it avoids the pitfalls of the X86 architecture used by Intel and advanced micro devices and the problems that related to trusting a single supplier – Arm companies – for the underlying designs.
“The RISC-V ecosystem is open, it is not owned, it is not checked by one company,” said Marr in an interview with Reuters. “There are hundreds of players. There is enough room for innovation.”
Marr and other senior executives left last year and founded for Computing, with head office in Portland. Marr and other competitive managers were responsible for developing various important technologies at Intel that significantly improved the CPU performance.
The seed financing round was led by Eclipse Ventures and included Maverick Capital, Fundomo and Epiq Capital Group. Former Apple and Tesla chip architect Jim Keller also invested in De Ronde. Keller runs his own RISC-V company called Tenstorrent.
Founding the company was attractive because of the growing demand for high-performance computing, said Eclipse partner Greg Reichow in an interview. By 2030 it will be around $ 100 billion, he said.
“There is a big market wind in this,” said Reichow.
(Max A. Cherney in San Francisco; Edit by Kim Coghill)