Untether AI chip aims to accelerate innovation

AI chip startup Untether AI came out of stealth recently with $13 million in Series A funding from Intel Capital and other investors. Drawing from the team’s computer architecture research and experience in delivering over 1 billion chips to market, Untether AI is developing a powerful new AI chip that eliminates the data movement bottleneck that costs energy and performance in traditional architectures. 

“We’re at a historic moment in computing right now. AI is changing the nature of what computers do. They can now interact with the real world based on recognizing patterns instead of following procedures,”says Martin Snelgrove, CEO of Untether AI. “These advances in AI have opened up tremendous possibilities for business and technological innovation, but traditional processors are not best suited to this new type of computing. Now is the time to build a new kind of ultra-efficient chip for new frontiers in AI applications — from autonomous vehicles, data centers, mobile, vision processing and beyond — that will ultimately change how everything works,” Snelgrove adds.

Martin Snelgrove, CEO of Untether AI

“In under five months after a small initial seed investment, Untether AI was able to build a successful prototype based on a processing-near-memory architecture that promises to enable dramatically higher efficiencies and performance for AI accelerators,” says Dave Flanagan, vice president and senior managing director of Intel Capital. “This is a team with decades of experience in chip design, and they’re now developing a commercial product for neural net inference – in an AI inference market that’s projected to grow to $22 billion by 2022.”

Darrick Wiebe, CTO of Untether AI

“The AI inference market is poised for disruption and explosive growth. Cloud AI inference has an efficiency problem; automotive AI chips are underpowered; and sophisticated AI at the edge will flatten batteries in no time,” says Darrick Wiebe, CTO of Untether AI. “By introducing a completely scalable and ultra-efficient inference architecture, Untether AI is uniquely positioned to address each of those market segments with what will be by far the most energy-efficient AI accelerator.”