Chip designer mimicking brain receives $25-million grant

Ren Neuromorphics, a startup designing chips that mimic the way the brain works and aims to serve companies that use artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, said Wednesday it has raised $25 million (about $187 million). Raised Rs.

Gordon Wilson, CEO and co-founder of Rain said that most aye The chips on the market today are digital, his company’s technology is analog. Digital chips read 1s and 0s while analog chips can sense incremental information such as sound waves.

“It’s about looking at the brain first for clues as to how we can create a new substrate of computation,” Wilson said. “By building neural circuits, we can simultaneously achieve extraordinary efficiency and extraordinary scale.”

AI market is currently dominating NVIDIA’s graphic chips. Other US startups that are raising funds include Sambanova Systems, Grok and Cerebras Systems.

Sam AltmanA well-known investor and AI researcher in Silicon Valley who is an early proponent of Rain, told Reuters by e-mail that the company’s “neuromorphic approach could significantly reduce the cost of building powerful AI models and hopefully one day enable will help to achieve true artificial general intelligence.”

Rain’s chip is designed by adding a circuit called a memristor on top of silicon wafers. Memristor, originally designed by Himachal Pradesh About a decade ago, labs functioned as ‘artificial synapses’ that allow processing and memory to happen in one place, Wilson said, making AI algorithms much faster and more energy-efficient than existing digital AI chips. It becomes possible to drive efficiently.

Wilson said the funds raised will be used to expand the engineering team as Ren takes its prototype chip to the next stage of development.

The latest funding round was led by Prosperity 7 Ventures, a venture capital fund of Aramco Enterprise.

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