Arago, a Paris-based startup building energy-efficient chips for AI, has emerged from stealth with a $26m seed round.
The startup was cofounded over a year ago by Eliott Sarrey and Ambroise Müller, both former researchers at ETH Zurich, and CEO Nicolas Muller, who has previously worked as a data scientist at a number of deeptech startups.
The seed round, which largely comprised equity funding, was led by European VCs Earlybird and Visionaries Tomorrow as well as US investor Protagonist. It included participation from US investor GenerativeIQ and French VC C4 Ventures.
A number of high-profile angel investors also joined the round including former Apple vice president of software engineering Bertrand Serlet, Arm general manager Christophe Frey, Datadog cofounder Olivier Pomel and Hugging Face cofounder Thomas Wolf.
Light-based chips
One of the key challenges faced by AI is how energy-intensive the technology is, requiring large-scale data centres containing tens of thousands of graphics processing units (GPUs). GPUs are a special type of chip specialised for AI models and currently almost entirely produced by US tech giant Nvidia.
“Today we have data centres the size of Manhattan […], and yet we are maxing out in terms of the infrastructure available for AI,” Muller tells Sifted.
“We decided to radically rethink the way chips are made, using light instead of electricity to carry out computations.”
Using particles of light (or photons) to process data in the chips generates less heat than electrons in conventional processors. Muller says Arago’s technology can reduce energy consumption by 10-30x compared to Nvidia chips.
The company, which has presence in France, the US, the UK and Israel, has already developed its first product. Muller says Arago is “fabless”, meaning it designs the chips and outsources manufacturing to specialised partners.
“Our value chain is based entirely in Europe and the US,” says Muller, without specifying which partners the startup is working with.
The technology has been tested with business and industry partners, and Muller says the chip is compatible with existing AI software, compute infrastructure and manufacturing processes.
A growing market
Improving the efficiency of AI chips is a fast-growing market, whether to reduce the cost of running AI models or to mitigate the reliance of enterprises and governments on Nvidia products.
Last year German startup Black Semiconductor, which makes graphene-based microchips with a photonic layer on top, secured nearly €255m in Series A funding. Belgian-French startup Vertical Compute, which focuses on the memory bottleneck of AI chips, recently raised a €20m seed.
With the funding, Muller says Arago will start commercialising its product, with first sales expected in the coming months.
“What’s missing is not demand for what we are developing. If we had 10k Arago processors to sell today, we’d sell them,” says Muller. “What’s missing is mass manufacturing.”
The startup, which already has 20 employees, also plans to grow its team across the US, France and Israel.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/arago-26m-seed-round/
