Chuangyebang learned that today's ink core artificial intelligence completed hundreds of millions of yuan of A round of financing. The round of financing was led by Cornerstone Capital and the Greater Bay Area Common Home Development Fund, followed by Tongwei Capital, Huasheng Capital and Shenzhen Angel Fund of Funds. The financing is mainly used for the mass production of the first chip and the expansion of the sparse ecosystem. China Renaissance Capital serves as the exclusive FA for this round.
After this round of financing, the first chip cloud AI chip Inteng processor ANTIUM will be launched in early 2022.
As an AI chip designer committed to disruptive innovation, Moxin Artificial Intelligence adopts the world-leading sparse algorithm to create the world's next generation of artificial intelligence chips, and is becoming the global leader in the ERA of AI chips 2.0.
Founded in Silicon Valley in 2018, Ink Core Artificial Intelligence is the only company with dual sparse algorithm technology to define the AI chip architecture. Most of its founding teams are from carnegie Mellon University's top AI scientists, the world's top semiconductor companies (such as Intel, Qualcomm, Marvell and Oracle) core high-volume chip research and development team. At present, Moxin is headquartered in Shenzhen and has R&D branches in Shanghai, Beijing and Silicon Valley.
According to public information, the global AI chip market size will be about 10.1 billion US dollars in 2020, and the compound annual growth rate of China's AI chip market will reach 52.1% from 2020 to 2025. Although the AI chip industry is in the early stage of rapid development, it faces a major challenge: on the one hand, the AI era has led to a sharp increase in the demand for computing power, on the other hand, the growth rate of AI chip computing power based on Moore's Law is far from meeting the demand - the market urgently needs innovative chip design solutions designed for AI acceleration and can reduce costs and increase efficiency for customers.
Unlike other players in the industry, the ink core believes that less is more, and believes that the chip is like the human brain, activating different computing units when performing different tasks, which is the concept of sparseness. Ink core is one of the first companies to work on redefining the AI chip architecture with sparse algorithm technology, and has led the industry in commercialization.
According to the ink core announced earlier, the first chip Inteng processor ANTOUM carrying the innovative sparse technology of the ink core and the anantoum-based cloud-thinning AI computing cards SparseOne™️ (half-height and half-length) and Sparse Megatron™️ (full-height full-length) will be released in the first quarter of 2022.
ANTOUM can support up to 32X sparseness rates, which is currently the highest and only in the industry. Compared with the current industry flagship products, the energy efficiency ratio of the Inton processor (ANTOUM) has increased by 1 order of magnitude, and the single card computing power has increased by 5-10 times. At the same time, it supports the mainstream development framework and a wide range of AI operator libraries and models in the current market, and can compile more than 200 neural network models, that is to say, ANTOUM chips provide high computing power and high energy efficiency ratio at the same time, and versatility is also an important competitive advantage of the ink core software stack.
At the end of December 2021, ANTOUM won the 23rd CHTF Excellent Product Award for its innovation in the field of AI chips.
At present, the chip has been returned from the TSMC current chip, and the first power-on on the day was successfully lit within a few seconds, and in less than 48 hours, the basic test of all functional modules was completed synchronously and the full model of ResNet50 was run through.
Wang Fei, executive director of Cornerstone Capital, introduced that Cornerstone Capital began to lay out in the field of AI and chips very early. He said: "As far as AI chips are concerned, we have seen a lot of startups in the industry, whether it is from the subversive innovation of the underlying technology, or from the commercial landing potential, the ink core is one of the leaders." Ai chip market space is large, high growth rate, the market urgently needs revolutionary innovative solutions outside the GPU, the ink core double sparse technology is like this. At present, there is no AI acceleration chip on the market that directly supports high magnification sparsity, and the ink core is the earliest company to focus on double-sparse technology, and the results are leading the industry - we have seen the simulation test results of its first chip ANTOUM on the Palatine platform, and its energy efficiency ratio will bring surprises to the industry. ”
Liu Jing, a partner of Tongwei Capital, introduced that when Tongwei Capital invests in cutting-edge technology, it will first thoroughly study the gold content of the underlying technology, and once it decides to invest, it will be very firm.
Liu Jing said: "In the AI chip industry, the most attractive thing about the ink core is that the sparse technology can innovate from the underlying chip architecture, and the core is to achieve dynamic optimization. Another important reason is that the ink core has a strong engineer gene. This means that the core issues such as how to commercialize the sparse technology, the tool chain, etc., the ink core team has thought very clearly and is at the forefront of the industry. The configuration of the entire team makes it very practical to commercialize the sparse technology. The first product of The ink core, the Yingteng processor and the cloud AI acceleration card, will focus on the cloud AI reasoning market, which is more suitable for AI chip companies to enter and achieve commercialization first. ”
Dr. Zhu Jianfeng, chairman of Huasheng Capital Group Co., Ltd., believes that the AI chip market in China and even the world is still in its early stages, and diversification is the main theme of the future development of the industry. The domestic data market is easier to build a cloud collaborative ecosystem integrating data centers and AI edge computing, and has great market development potential in the future.
He said: "In the next 5 years, the scale of cloud inference will exceed 10 billion US dollars, and the demand for computing power will show explosive growth, while on the other hand, hardware upgrades are limited by Moore's Law, and the industry urgently needs revolutionary architecture innovation AI computing products." To solve the problem of energy efficiency, sparsity is the development direction of AI neural networks. The unique dual-sparsity technology of the ink core can achieve up to 32 times the compression ratio, which is more than 10 times the energy efficiency ratio compared to the world's flagship mainstream products. It seems to us to have a lot of potential. ”
Liu Xiangning, deputy general manager of Shenzhen Angel Fund of Funds Management Company, said: "Moxin is the first batch of projects invested by angel fund of funds "Angel No. 1", and artificial intelligence, as one of the advantageous industries in Shenzhen, is the investment track that we focus on and layout. At present, there are many AI chip players, each with its own strengths, we believe that the ink core has a strong competitive strength: a unique double sparse algorithm, a soft and hardware integration design and a world-leading team, I believe that the ink core has the opportunity to grow into China's first-class or even world-class computing hardware provider. Shenzhen Angel Fund of Funds has comprehensively built a good development ecology for start-ups through various services such as funds and venues, and in the future, Shenzhen Angel Fund of Funds will continue to help the development of excellent startups in Shenzhen, including ink cores.
Wang Wei, founder and CEO of Moxin Artificial Intelligence, introduced that the investment partners of this round of financing are long-termists who firmly invest in hard technology, and their active blessing will accelerate the mass production and market of the next generation of Inteng processor products.
He said: "The values of Ink Core are Dreambig, Daretofail , and Technology for Good. The pursuit of disruptive innovation is the soul and lifeblood of technology startups. Sparse is the most potential and advantageous direction of matrix and tensor computing, sparseness will not only change the future of AI chips, but also the research direction and products of the ink core will help enterprises significantly reduce costs and increase efficiency in the transformation to AI, and in a larger sense, help China's green computing and carbon peak carbon neutrality contribute their own strength. "Attached
![People of insight believe that as long as they are themselves, they have nothing to lose. When the city of Nora was destroyed by the barbarians, Bishop Polynus lost everything and also took prisoner of him[fig]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAP///wAAACwAAAAAAQABAAACAkQBADs=)