TORONTO — AI chip startup Untether AI is announcing that Toronto-based Radical Ventures had joined Intel Capital and other investors in its Series A, with Radical Ventures partner Tomi Poutanen joining as a board member. After building a successful prototype of the ultra-efficient, high-performance chip in under five months with a small seed investment, Untether AI went on to secure $20 million in Series A which closed in May 2019.
As Untether AI continues to make rapid progress developing its market-leading chip architecture and advances into its next chapter of growth, technology veteran Arun Iyengar is joining as CEO. A former Altera, AMD and Xilinx executive, Iyengar brings over 20 years of operational and general management experience across a variety of markets from automotive, cloud, to wired and wireless infrastructure.
“We’re thrilled to welcome Arun as CEO to lead Untether AI into our next stage of growth,” said Martin Snelgrove, Untether AI’s co-founder and founding CEO who had developed the company’s groundbreaking new chip architecture with co-founder Darrick Wiebe. “The investment momentum as well as incredible technical strides we’ve been making this year have propelled Untether AI’s product and go-to-market roadmaps to exciting new paces. With his extensive experience scaling businesses from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars, Arun is a savvy technology veteran who will lead Untether AI to new heights.” Snelgrove will assume the role of CTO.
“I am excited to be joining the Untether AI leadership team alongside some of the best engineering and scientific minds in computing,” said Arun Iyengar, CEO of Untether of AI. “The history for computing and AI chips is being written right now, and Untether AI is emerging as a pioneer in the space. We look forward to working with world-class investors Intel Capital and Radical Ventures as we prepare to introduce groundbreaking chip innovations that will enable new frontiers in AI applications.”
“Arun’s appointment as CEO marks an exciting development for Untether AI” said Tomi Poutanen, co-founder of Radical Ventures and board member of Untether AI. “With Arun’s deep end-market expertise and the founding team’s extensive experience bringing chips to market, Untether AI’s developing transformative chip architecture has the potential to disrupt a range of industries, from data centers, autonomous vehicles, vision processing and other embedded applications.” In addition to starting Radical Ventures with Jordan Jacobs, Poutanen and Jacobs founded leading AI company Layer 6 which was acquired by TD Bank and where Poutanen serves as Chief AI Officer.
“With Arun’s leadership, a founding team with decades of experience in chip design, and significant technical progress, Untether AI is well poised to bring to market a powerful new kind of AI chip that eliminates data movement bottlenecks that costs energy and performance,” said Dave Flanagan, vice president and senior managing director of Intel Capital.
About Untether AI
Untether AI® provides energy-centric AI inference acceleration from the edge to the cloud, supporting any type of neural network model. With its at-memory compute architecture, Untether AI has solved the data movement bottleneck that costs energy and performance in traditional CPUs and GPUs, resulting in high-performance, low-latency neural network inference acceleration without sacrificing accuracy. Untether AI embodies its technology in runAI® and speedAI™ devices, tsunAImi® acceleration cards, and its imAIgine® Software Development Kit. Founded in Toronto in 2018, Untether AI is funded by CPPIB, GM Ventures, Intel Capital, Radical Ventures, and Tracker Capital. More information can be found at www.untether.ai.
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