Raja Koduri’s Oxmiq Labs raises $35M to lower the design cost of custom AI silicon

Artificial intelligence chipmaking startup Oxmiq Labs Inc. says it wants to become the next Arm Holdings Plc. after raising $35 million in an early-stage A funding, bringing its total amount raised to date to $60 million.

Today’s Series A round was led by investors that included Fundomo and Samsung Catalyst Fund, and saw participation from MediaTek, AM Intelligence Labs, Pegatron Venture Capital, CDIB-TEN, Darwin Ventures and Morgan Creek Digital.

Oxmiq is founded and led by the respected graphics processing unit architect Raja Koduri (pictured), who formerly served as the chief architect and Executive Vice President of Intel Corp.’s architecture, graphics and software division. In an interview with Reuters, Joduri explained that his company is working on a new chip design architecture and software that will dramatically lower the cost of developing AI chips. The funds from today’s round will help to scale Oxmiq’s proprietary GPU architecture OxCore, which makes it easier for semiconductor firms and AI systems builders to design custom silicon without a full chip program.

According to Koduri, developing a cutting-edge AI chip usually costs hundreds of millions of dollars and requires several years. It’s an intricate process that involves making the silicon design plans and building the software needed to support it. Oxmiq aims to simplify that process by collapsing three distinct components of an AI system into a single intellectual property block it can license to customers. “A licensable core with an open architecture means design teams everywhere can build the custom AI silicon their work needs,” Koduri said.

Generally, AI chip systems incorporate both GPUs and central processing units, but Oxmiq’s plan is to combine them both with a third component it calls a “tensor engine” into a single design, Koduri explained. It will then license the whole thing. “We would want to be the Arm of this next era,” Koduri said, in reference to the U.K.-based semiconductor firm that supplies the designs and IP for almost every smartphone chip in the world.

Oxmiq is also developing a computing fabric called OxQuilt, which combines heterogeneous compute chiplets and memory into a single package. Chiplets are several specific chips that form a complete system. With OxQuilt, chip designers will be able to adapt to any supply chain using configuration tools that let customers mix and match different process nodes, memory types, interconnect standards and advanced packaging systems.

The architecture is also designed to incorporate emerging interconnects based on silicon photonics when they reach maturity. Meanwhile, its software stack includes something called OxCapsule for orchestration and OxPython, which makes it possible to run existing CUDA and PyTorch code on OxCore without modifying it first.

Koduri said Oxmiq eventually wants to compete in the custom chip market with semiconductor giants such as Broadcom Inc., Marvell Technologies Inc. and MediaTek Inc., which help companies such as Google LLC, Amazon Web Services Inc., and OpenAI Group PBC design and build their own silicon. The company’s ultimate goal is to make chip design more accessible.

“Today, state-of-the-art AI reaches most people through a handful of channels and the cost of the compute underneath is the reason for this,” Koduri said. “By bringing that cost down, you widen who gets to build with it.

Going forward, Koduri said the funds will help the company to finish its first batch of IP and make it available as a product. In addition, it wants to expand its engineering team to try and scale its business.

Fundomo partner Rajeev Surati said he’s backing Oxmiq because Koduri possesses intimate knowledge of every layer of the silicon stack and knows exactly where the main constraints exist. “Most compute IP makes the customer bend their memory, packaging and foundry around the chip,” he said. “Oxmiq does the opposite and that flips a cost center into leverage.”

Images: Oxmiq Labs