Velaura AI Inc., a developer of low-power artificial intelligence chips, today announced that it has raised $110 million in funding.

Seligman Ventures led the Series A round. It was joined by Samsung Catalyst Fund, Mayfield and more than a half-dozen others. Velaura is now valued at more than $1 billion.

The deal comes six months after the company changed its market focus and brand. Velaura was earlier known as Auradine and developed bitcoin mining chips. The company’s most advanced crypto processor, the liquid-cooled Teraflux AH3880, can perform up to 600 trillion computations per second. A feature called EnergyTune enables the chip to lower its energy usage when grid capacity is limited.

In March, Velaura shifted its focus from crypto accelerators to a new offering called Titan Core. It’s a suite of processor building blocks and professional services designed to help customers develop AI chips. Like the company’s Teraflux AH3880 crypto accelerator, Titan Core places an emphasis on energy efficiency.

Large language models use mathematical operations called matrix multiplications to generate prompt responses. According to Velaura, such calculations and certain related operations can account for up to 70% of an AI chip’s power usage. It claims that Titan Core reduces the amount of energy required for those calculations by a factor of two to four. That can translate to savings of up to $1,300 per chip over three years.

“Every advance in AI, from reasoning models to embodied intelligence, creates demand for more compute, and ultimately more power,” said Velaura Chief Executive Officer Rajiv Khemani (pictured, right, with the company’s other co-founders). “The next era of AI will be defined not only by better models, but also by fundamentally better compute economics.”

Chip designers assemble processor designs from building blocks called cells. A cell is a set of transistors designed to perform a specific task such as storing bits. Titan Core includes a cell library, a collection of pre-packaged cell designs that removes the need for customers to develop everything from scratch. Velaura says that the modules are optimized to operate at low voltage.

Customers with more advanced requirements can commission custom low-voltage circuits. According to Velaura, chip teams only need to provide an RTL file that describes the processor they wish to design. An RTL file is a kind of high-level processor blueprint that doesn’t specify how cells should be implemented. 

The company also provides customers with what it describes as a “proprietary toolflow.” It’s a collection of technical assets that help engineers increase the reliability and manufacturing yield of their chips.

Velaura says Titan Core supports multiple manufacturing processes including the chip industry’s latest three- and two-nanometer nodes. The company disclosed today that it’s working with multiple hyperscalers on chip projects that use those technologies. Beyond the data center market, it sees customers using its low-voltage chip technology to develop processors for edge devices. 

It will use its new funding to accelerate engineering initiatives and grow its customer-facing teams.

Photo: Velaura