Enfabrica, AI hardware manufacturer, raises $125M

Enfabrica, an AI hardware manufacturer, has recently secured $125M in a Series B funding round, raising its valuation to five times its post-Series A worth. This financing round saw participation from prominent firms like Atreides Management, Nvidia, and Liberty Global Ventures. Now, Enfabrica stands tall with a total funding amount of $148M.

• Unique Focus Area: Enfabrica’s focus is on creating networking chips tailored for AI and machine learning workloads. This achievement is especially notable in the usually challenging funding landscape for chip startups and deep tech ventures.

• Established Leaders: Founded by Rochan Sankar and Shrijeet Mukherjee, who have their roots in Broadcom and Google respectively, Enfabrica was established in 2020 and emerged from stealth mode in 2023.

• Mission: Enfabrica's key objective is to respond to the AI industry's escalating demand for a parallel, accelerated, and heterogeneous infrastructure. They're committed to mitigating the scaling issues of the AI industry linked to cost and sustainability.

• Key Innovation - The ACF-S: At the heart of Enfabrica's innovation is the 'Accelerated Compute Fabric Switch' or ACF-S. Its highlights include:

  • It supports "multi-terabit-per-second" data transfer between GPUs, CPUs, and AI accelerator chips.

  • Its scalability extends up to thousands of nodes and reduces GPU compute for large language models by around 50%, maintaining the same performance.

  • It is agnostic to the type and brand of AI processor used, thereby sidestepping any proprietary lock-in.

Despite competition from heavyweights such as Cisco, Broadcom, and Marvell, Enfabrica's unique offerings and solutions.