Blaize emerges from stealth with $87 million for its custom-designed AI chips

There's booming demand for silicon custom-designed to accelerate AI workloads, as the gobs of cash raised by startups like Hailo Technologies, Graphcore, and Untether AI demonstrates. The fierce competition isn't deterring Blaize (formerly Thinci), which hopes to stand out from the crowd with a novel graph streaming architecture. The nine-year-old startup's claimed system-on-chip performance is impressive, to be fair, which is likely why it's raised nearly $100 million from investors including automotive component maker Denso. Blaize emerged from stealth today with $87 million raised over several venture rounds from strategic and venture backers Denso, Daimler, SPARX Group, Magna, Samsung Catalyst Fund, Temasek, GGV Capital, SGInnovate, and Magna; the second-to-last round closed in September 2018 and totaled $65 million. The company initially focused on what it called vision processors -- chips to speed up vision, radar, and sensor fusion tasks -- before expanding to encompass datacenters, edge infrastructure devices, and enterprise client devices.