TORONTO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Untether AITM, the leader in at-memory computation and AI inference acceleration, today announced an oversubscribed $125 million funding round led by an affiliate of Tracker Capital Management, LLC (“Tracker Capital”), a stage-agnostic venture capital investor that principally invests in high-potential technology growth companies. Tracker Capital was founded by Stephen A. Feinberg who is also Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Cerberus Capital Management. The round was co-led by Intel Capital, Intel Corporation’s global investment organization, and included participation from new investor Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (“CPP Investments”) and existing investor Radical Ventures.
As part of the funding round, Tracker Capital Senior Advisor Dr. Shaygan Kheradpir will join Untether AI’s Board of Directors. Previously, Dr. Kheradpir served as Verizon’s Group CIO, Barclays Bank Group COO, and CEO of Coriant and Juniper Networks.
“I am pleased to add Tracker Capital to our prestigious group of investors and welcome Shaygan to our Board,” said Arun Iyengar, CEO, Untether AI. “Tracker Capital’s unmatched experience and relationships across sectors will help speed our engagements in multiple high-value markets, including telecom, technology, financial services, retail, and defense. I am also thrilled to welcome CPP Investments to the Untether AI family. With the new funding round and partnerships, we will be able to expand our current product reach and accelerate the development of our next generation products."
Dr. Kheradpir commented on the investment from Tracker Capital: “Untether AI has a scalable architecture that provides a revolutionary approach to AI inference acceleration. Its industry-leading power efficiency can deliver the compute density and flexibility required for current and future AI workloads in the cloud, for edge computing, and embedded devices.”
In addition to new investors Tracker Capital and CPP Investments, all existing investors participated in the round, which further validates the benefits of at-memory compute and the progress made by Untether AI.
Saf Yeboah-Amankwah, Intel Chief Strategy Officer added: “We have been an investor in Untether AI since the seed round. During that time Untether AI has assembled a world-class management team, developed and launched an exceptional product, and is now poised for growth in the burgeoning AI inference acceleration space.”
“AI has become a key enabling technology for many industries and Untether AI’s novel compute architecture has the potential to accelerate adoption across a number of use cases providing a strong value proposition to its customers,” said Leon Pedersen, Managing Director, Head of Thematic Investing, CPP Investments. “We seek to invest in innovative companies with strong market opportunities and we are pleased to support this leading Canadian AI technology company.”
Architecting the Next Generation of AI Compute
The dramatic increase in the usage of AI, along with its heavy computational requirements, is overwhelming traditional compute architectures, and drastically increasing power consumption in datacenters. Untether AI’s at-memory compute architecture breaks through the computational bottleneck and changes the paradigm for AI compute efficiency. Untether AI’s tsunAImi accelerator cards powered by runAI devices provide record-breaking energy efficiency and compute density for inference acceleration. The new funding enables the company to extend its leadership position, enhance its software offering, and build its next generation products.
Expanding Engagements in Multiple Markets
With this latest funding round, Untether AI will be well-positioned to accelerate and expand its customer engagements across a multitude of markets. Since at-memory computation is both general purpose and extremely energy efficient, it can be used in a variety of industries and applications, including banking and financial services; natural language processing; autonomous vehicles; smart city and retail; and other applications that require high-throughput and low-latency AI acceleration.
About Untether AI
Untether AI provides ultra-efficient, high-performance AI chips to enable new frontiers in AI applications. By combining the power efficiency of at-memory computation with the robustness of digital processing, Untether AI has developed a groundbreaking new chip architecture for neural net inference that eliminates the data movement bottleneck that costs energy and performance in traditional architectures. Founded in Toronto in 2018, Untether AI is funded by Tracker Capital, Intel Capital, CPP Investments, and Radical Ventures. www.untether.ai.
About Tracker Capital
A venture-focused investor based in New York, Tracker Capital aims to invest in high-potential technologies and companies across various end markets and stages of growth. Tracker Capital was founded by Stephen Feinberg, Co-Founder and Co-Chief Executive Officer of Cerberus Capital Management, L.P., as a separate and independent investment vehicle focused on early-stage investments. In addition to investing resources to fund development, Tracker Capital’s venture-oriented platform provides guidance and operational support to entrepreneurs to help transform their ideas, concepts, technologies, and businesses into proven, sustainable organizations.
About Intel Capital
Intel Capital invests in innovative startups targeting artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, datacenter and cloud, 5G, next-generation compute and a wide range of other disruptive technologies. Since 1991, Intel Capital has invested US$12.9 billion in more than 1,582 companies worldwide, and 692 portfolio companies have gone public or participated in a merger. Intel Capital curates thousands of business development introductions each year between its portfolio companies and the Global 2000. For more information on what makes Intel Capital one of the world’s most powerful venture capital firms, visit www.intelcapital.com or follow @Intelcapital.
About CPP Investments
Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments™) is a professional investment management organization that manages the Fund in the best interest of the more than 20 million contributors and beneficiaries of the Canada Pension Plan. In order to build diversified portfolios of assets, investments are made around the world in public equities, private equities, real estate, infrastructure and fixed income. Headquartered in Toronto, with offices in Hong Kong, London, Luxembourg, Mumbai, New York City, San Francisco, São Paulo and Sydney, CPP Investments is governed and managed independently of the Canada Pension Plan and at arm's length from governments. At March 31, 2021, the Fund totaled $497.2 billion. For more information, please visit www.cppinvestments.com or follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter.
All references to Untether AI trademarks are the property of Untether.AI. All other trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.
