Endiya Partners, Emerald Technology lead Series B round in AlphaICs

AlphaICs Corp., which operates an eponymous startup focused on edge AI and use cases for this technology, has raised $8 million (about Rs 58.5 crore) in a Series B fundraising exercise.

The funding round in AlphaICs, which is based in California and Bengaluru, was led by Endiya Partners and Emerald Technology Ventures, the startup said in a statement.

Other participants in this Series B infusion include Rebright Partners, 3one4 Capital, Aaruha Technology Fund, IREON Ventures, Canal Ventures, JSR Corporation, CBC Co. Ltd and Whiteboard Capital.

As part of this round, Michal Natora, who is the investment director (industrial IT) at Emerald Technology Ventures, will join the board of directors at AlphaICs.

The company, which operates in India as AlphaICs India Pvt. Ltd, was set up in 2016. It operates in the field of edge AI, a system that uses machine learning algorithms to process data on local hardware, as opposed to in the cloud.

AlphaICs claims that its platform, Real AI Processor (RAPTM), enables AI-based acceleration for low-power edge applications and high-performance edge data centres. The company will use the capital to bring its first inference processor to the market, further develop its software stack and to build solutions for segments it is targeting.

“While NVidia, Google and startups like Graphcore are poised to dominate data centre AI, AlphaICs has the opportunity to be a market leader in enabling AI at the edge,” said Sateesh Andra, managing director, Endiya Partners.

Earlier this month, the VC firm marked the final close of its new fund, meeting its corpus target of Rs 500 crore (about $70 million).

Some of the sectors that AlphaICs is targeting include industrial, automotive and surveillance.

Deals in the AI space

The investment in AlphaICs is the latest example of a frontier technology-focused company raising capital. Interest in the AI space has grown significantly, with several startups targeting the business-to-business (B2B) segment.

Last month, observability platform LOGIQ raised $1.8 million (about Rs 13.2 crore) in a seed funding exercise led by early-stage firm Leo Capital. LOGIQ says its platform helps IT and DevOps teams at enterprises solve the problem of handling the volume and variety of data within their organisations.

Also in December, data analytics firm Tredence Inc. raised $30 million (about Rs 220 crore) from Chicago Pacific Founders, a private equity firm focused on the healthcare services sector.

At the end of November, American venture capital firm General Catalyst led a $125 million (about Rs 925 crore) Series D round in Eightfold AI Inc., which operates a talent lifecycle platform.