AI chipmaker Tachyum to seek commercialization funding in the second quarter
AI chipmaker Tachyum to seek commercialization funding in the second quarter
TIM LEEMASTER
Tachyum co-founder and CEO Radoslav Danilak
Tachyum, the Santa Clara, California-based AI chip developer, plans to launch an up to USD 40m funding round in the second quarter, says co-founder and CEO Radoslav Danilak.
About half the funding would come from government sources in Europe and Asia and the other half from the private sector, Danilak said.
The company raised USD 25m in a Series A led by private equity firm IPM Group in the middle of last year. The Slovak government also participated.
Danilak said they favor government funding for the easier valuation process and potential future customers. It does take more time, however, to raise state funds. “It’s about 10 times more paperwork,” the CEO said and the Series A took about six months longer than expected.
Tachyum is developing the Prodigy Universal Processor Chip which it says will require ten times less power than Intel’s Xeon chips and can operate faster than chips made by NVIDIA.
Tachyum is Greek and roughly translates to “an element of speed”.
The company is focusing on servers and supercomputers and data analysis, such as that generated by autonomous driving.
The company plans to finalize the chip design, or ‘tapeout’, by the end of the year. That may slip, however, depending on how much suppliers are hit by the coronavirus outbreak, Danilak said.
That’s already impacted the funding round, which was originally scheduled for the first quarter of this year.
Danilak expects to get chips in customer hands in the late first or early second quarter next year and then, after some inevitable debugging, begin production in the second half of 2021 and start generating revenue.
Tachyum plans to market most chips at between USD 1500 to USD 3000. A small set of higher performance chips could go for as much as USD 10,000 and defective but still usable chips would go for as little as USD 200.
The company develops hardware in the Bay Area and software in Bratislava, Slovakia.
It currently employs 60 people and by the end of the year it plans to have about 100 staff. The new hires would be roughly split between sales, marketing and customer service and engineering.
Currently about 60% of staff is in the US and 40% works in Europe. Those numbers are expected to reverse to mostly European-based staff, which are cheaper, after the next set of hiring.
Danilak started the company in 2016 with Igor Shevlyakov, Ken Wagner and Rodney Mullendore, who are colleagues from previous startups that include Skyera, Wave Computing and SandForce.
Danilak has also worked at NVIDIA, the largest AI chip maker, where he was a chipset architect.