SiMa.ai bags $70M funding led by Maverick Capital

SiMa.ai, a machine learning (ML) company, has bagged $70 million in a funding round led by Maverick Capital, with participation from Point72 and Jericho, as well as existing investors including Amplify Partners, Dell Technologies Capital, Fidelity Management, and Lip-Bu Tan.

The California-based company, which has raised a total of $270 million to date, aims to fulfil customer demand for edge AI/ML using its first-generation ML System-on-Chip (MLSoC) and expedite the rollout of its next-generation MLSoC with the recent fundraise.

The funds will be used to establish an even broader sales network, increasing the bandwidth to handle all customers and enter the automotive industry, Harald Kroeger, President of Automotive Business at SiMa.ai, told YourStory.

The new chip will cover a vast spectrum, offering performance ranging from very small to very high, allowing for easy scaling within a family that ranges from 25 to 200 TOPS, according to Kroeger.

TOPS stands for Trillions or Tera Operations per Second and is a measure of computing performance.

The software-centric edge MLSoC company plans to launch its second-generation chip in Q1 2025. This release will introduce the ‘one platform for all edge AI’—scaling with customers’ AI/ML needs from computer vision to multi-modal generative AI (GenAI).

The initial MLSoC focuses on vision-centric edge inference, with future generations designed to support various modalities chosen by customers. Multi-modal inputs comprise text-to-speech, text-to-image, speech-to-text, speech-to-image, audio-to-image, image-to-image, and image-to-video transformations.

“AI—particularly the rapid rise of generative AI—is fundamentally reshaping the way that humans and machines work together. Our customers are poised to benefit from giving sight, sound and speech to their edge devices, which is exactly what our next-generation MLSoC is designed to do,” Krishna Rangasayee, Founder and CEO of SiMa.ai, said.

Edge devices cover a broad spectrum of technologies used in a variety of industries, ranging from manufacturing and healthcare to transportation and beyond. It includes robots for industrial and domestic applications, drones utilised for surveillance and delivery, diagnostic machines employed in healthcare for medical testing and analysis, and autonomous vehicles designed for transportation and logistics.

“The computational intensity of generative AI has precipitated a paradigm shift in data centre architecture. The next phase in this evolution will be the widespread adoption of AI at the edge. Just as the data centre has been revolutionised, the edge computing landscape is poised for a complete transformation,” Andrew Homan, Senior Managing Director, Maverick Capital, noted, adding that SiMa.ai is positioned as a key player for customers traversing this tectonic shift. 

According to Gartner, semiconductors tailored for AI tasks are poised to present a $53.4 billion revenue opportunity for the semiconductor industry in 2023, a 20.9% surge from the previous year.

Founded in 2018, SiMa.ai claims its hardware-to-software stack adapts to any framework, network, model, sensor, or modality within a single platform. Furthermore, ML applications running solely on SiMa.ai's MLSoC witnessed a tenfold increase in performance and energy efficiency, enhancing the quality of ML use cases, the company claimed.

India market

“There is a huge interest in our solution in India. The customers are very forward-thinking—they want to delve into the ML/AI space and harness its benefits. I see Indian companies moving much faster than those in Europe, for example; they're much more bullish on applying these solutions to their production lines, sales structure, and products,” Kroeger remarked.

Kroeger further highlighted that India comprised half of SiMa.ai’s development effort, with engineers split between Bengaluru and Silicon Valley. The company began early to view India not only as a development hub but also as a crucial market.

In terms of business, the US, India, and Europe hold equal importance for the company, Kroeger said, adding that the firm is currently ramping up operations in the APAC region, where there is considerable interest.

Industry automation, logistics, and the automotive sector are the top three areas for its product applications. The company believes that GenAI will further accelerate the adoption of its products.

“The real Holy Grail is a machine that operates at the same speed as human conversation—where you can simply tell the machine what to do, and it immediately carries out the task without any delay. This capability would unlock numerous use cases,” Kroeger noted.