The Campbell, California company wants to let chip designers build custom AI silicon without a full chip program
Jason Marz / Getty Images
Oxmiq Labs closed a $35 million Series A round on Wednesday, bringing the Campbell, California company's total funding to $60 million. The round was co-led by Fundomo and Samsung Catalyst Fund, with participation from MediaTek, Pegatron Venture Capital, and several other financial and strategic investors.
The company, founded by former Intel $INTC chief architect Raja Koduri, is building licensable GPU and AI chip architecture aimed at lowering the cost of designing and running AI applications. Building a state-of-the-art AI chip is an enormously expensive undertaking, often requiring years of work and investments running into the hundreds of millions of dollars, according to Reuters. Rather than treating a GPU engine, a tensor processing engine, and a central processor as distinct elements, Oxmiq bundles all three into one licensable block of intellectual property — an approach Koduri outlined in an interview.
"We would want to be the Arm of this next era," Koduri said, referring to the U.K. company whose chip designs are used in nearly every smartphone in the world.
The company's core product is OxCore, a scalable, licensable GPU design that integrates the three compute engines into a single block. Oxmiq also offers OxQuilt, a chiplet integration architecture that combines multiple chips and memory in a single package and is designed to work across different foundries, memory types, and packaging options, the company said. The stack is paired with software tools, including OxPython, which allows developers to run existing code written for Nvidia $NVDA's CUDA platform on OxCore without changes.
Finishing its initial IP portfolio and bringing it to market are the primary uses for the new funding, Koduri said, with the company also planning to expand its engineering headcount as the business grows.
Jim Keller, CEO of chip startup Tenstorrent and one of the semiconductor industry's most prominent architects, joins Oxmiq's board of directors as part of the announcement. "Raja and this team are creating an open GPU architecture, a much-needed step toward removing the artificial boundaries around AI innovation," Jim Keller said in a statement.
Nvidia's dominance in AI chips has drawn a wave of challengers, as Quartz has tracked across the industry. Companies including Google $GOOGL and OpenAI have moved to design custom silicon, while others are betting on open licensing models and chiplet-based approaches to compete on cost and flexibility.
Oxmiq is targeting semiconductor companies, cloud providers, and AI system builders as potential licensees, the company said.
Join 500,000+ readers who start their day with Quartz.
By subscribing, you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
