AI Startup Neureality Raises $35 Mn to Develop AI Inference Chip

Israeli AI startup Neureality, known for designing AI-as-a-service infrastructure, raises $35 million in Series A funding. The new investment brings their total funding to $48 million. Prominent names like Cardumen Capital, Samsung Ventures, Varana Capital, OurCrowd and XT Hitech led the round. 

The funding will aim to commercialise the NR1 chip, which uses the new Network Addressable Processing Unit (NAPU) optimised for computer vision (e.g., object recognition in images), natural language processing (text generation), and recommendation engines (e.g., e-commerce). 

Established in 2018, Neutrality was co-founded by Moshe Tanach, Tzvika Shmueli, and Yossi Kasus. The company focuses on bringing AI hardware to market for cloud data centres and 'edge' computers. 

With NAPU, large-scale users like Hyperscalers and next-wave data centre customers will be able to support the growing scale of their AI usage. In addition, to increase effectiveness and make the adoption and deployment of AI in a larger variety of real-world applications simpler, NeuReality provides hardware, software, and tools that work in concert.

In a recent ZDNet article, the company said its hardware could clock 15x performance improvement per dollar than available GPUs and ASICs offered by deep learning accelerator vendors. 

Neureality reportedly collaborates closely with leading AI ecosystem partners like IBM, AMD, and Lenovo.  

Yoav Sebba, Managing Director at XT High-Tech, says that the growth of day-to-day usage of AI depends heavily on high performance and sustainable inference computing. As a result, several AI opportunities developed by software companies are coming up. Still, the existing hardware infrastructure restricts the deployment of those use cases. 

Earlier this week, Samsung also announced that it is partnering with internet portal giant Naver Corporation to develop AI chips to improve the efficiency of processing large AI data.