Synopsis
Architect Labs has secured $24 million in seed funding. The company will leverage artificial intelligence to accelerate and simplify the design of custom chips. This innovation aims to reduce the current two-year timeline and multi-million dollar costs associated with chip development. Architect Labs plans to assist both chip manufacturers and software firms in creating more efficient applications through custom hardware.Listen to this article in summarized format
American chip giant Broadcom and its smaller rival Marvell help design custom AI and other general-purpose computing chips for cloud computing companies like Amazon and Alphabet's Google. The custom chips designed by Marvell and Broadcom generate tens of billions of dollars in revenue and offer an alternative to Nvidia's powerful hardware.
Architect Labs aims to cheapen and speed the process, which now takes roughly two years and costs hundreds of millions of dollars in labor costs and research and development.
The company plans to target chip companies to help accelerate the design process but also software companies that could use custom chips to make their applications run faster or more efficiently, Architect co-founder Ebrahim Hussain said in an interview with Reuters.
"Their biggest problem today is not necessarily the backend execution or the layout," Hussain said. "Their biggest thing is how can I take this workload that I want to deliver to the world, whether it be AI or robotics or anything like that, and how can I build the (chip) architecture."
The Palo Alto, California-based company was founded by Hussain and Aaditya Subedi and has about 18 staffers, split between machine learning and hardware.
The goal, Subedi said, is to make chip design as accessible as Taiwan's TSMC has made chip manufacturing.
The company's funding round was led by Kindred Ventures and included TQ Ventures, Race Capital, and Together Fund. Google DeepMind Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, along with executives from OpenAI and Nvidia, have also invested in the company.
