Chipmaker Hailo Technologies Ltd. is reportedly preparing to list its shares through a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company.

Calcalist revealed the plan today, citing regulatory filings from Hailo investor Delek Automotive. The offering is reportedly designed to shore up the chipmaker’s finances amid an “urgent need for liquidity.” Hailo laid off nearly 10% of its workforce in January and took out a $9 million loan around the same time.

The company, which makes artificial intelligence chips for connected devices, was worth $1.2 billion in 2024. Delek’s regulatory filings indicate that the planned stock listing will reduce Hailo’s valuation to under $500 million.

A SPAC is an investment vehicle created for the sole purpose of taking another business public. Teaming up with such a company provides a faster path to public markets than a traditional listing. It also removed the need for startups to organize a roadshow, a series of events designed to bring institutional investors aboard.

Hailo’s chips are used in cameras, industrial robots and a wide range of other devices. They’re based on a design the company describes as a structure-driven dataflow architecture. Hailo says that the technology can run inference workloads more efficiently than competing processing approaches.

A neural network’s artificial neurons are organized into clusters called layers. The first layer carries out the initial calculations involved in answering an AI prompt and sends the result to the second layer for further processing. That second layer completes a second set of calculations, shares the output with the third layer and so forth.

Each layer runs on a different section of the host device’s processor. Hailo’s structure-driven dataflow architecture places layers on adjacent chip sections, which reduces the distance that data must travel when moving between them. Reducing data movement cuts both processing latency and power use.

One of Hailo’s most advanced chips, the Hailo-10H, can perform 40 trillion calculations per second when processing INT4 data. It uses about 2.5 watts of power and can withstand temperatures of up to 221 degrees Fahrenheit. Hailo also offers several chips optimized specifically for cameras along with a PCIe card that can be attached to servers.

The company ships its chips with a set of software tools designed to ease customers’ AI projects. There’s a runtime called HailoRT that can link together up to 16 Hailo devices into an inference cluster. Additionally, Hailo offers a set of pretrained AI models optimized to run on its chips.

Calcalist didn’t specify the SPAC with which the company will partner on its listing or the amount of funding that it hopes to raise. However, the report did state that Hailo plans to float its shares in the coming months on a U.S. stock exchange.

Image: Hailo