Enfabrica Corporation – a fast-growing startup building converged networking and memory fabric silicon and software tailored to the performance and scalability demands of AI and accelerated computing workloads – recently announced its successful close of a $125 million Series B financing round. The oversubscribed round – which increases Enfabrica’s valuation more than 5X – was led by Atreides Management, with support from existing investor Sutter Hill Ventures, and includes new investors NVIDIA, IAG Capital Partners, Liberty Global Ventures, Valor Equity Partners, Infinitum Partners and Alumni Ventures.
The new funding round will be deployed to advance the production of Enfabrica’s groundbreaking Accelerated Compute Fabric Switch (ACF-S) devices and solutions, which complement GPUs, CPUs, and accelerators to solve critical networking, I/O and memory scaling problems in data center AI and high-performance computing clusters. The company will showcase its ACF-S solutions at the AI Hardware and Edge AI Summit 2023 on Sept. 12–14 in Santa Clara, Calif.
Pursuant to the Series B financing, Gavin Baker, Managing Partner & CIO of Atreides Management, has joined Enfabrica’s Board of Directors to assist the company’s growth and strategic direction. And earlier this year, Enfabrica emerged from stealth mode to announce its revolutionary new class of AI infrastructure interconnect chips called Accelerated Compute Fabric devices. And Enfabrica’s ACF devices deliver unmatched scalability, performance, and total cost of ownership for distributed AI, extended reality, high-performance computing, and in-memory database infrastructure.
Enfabrica’s 8 Terabit/second ACF switching system – which directly bridges and internetworks GPUs, CPUs, and memories at scale with native, multi-port 800-Gigabit-Ethernet networking – is now accessible to customers for pre-order.
Generative AI, Large Language Model (LLM), and Deep Learning Recommendation Model (DLRM) technologies are increasing in adoption and it is also driving a massive infrastructure push in the cloud. So, aggregate AI training capacity and user serving scale will continue to grow exponentially. This, in turn, applies the pressure for cost and power efficiency to sustain the workload growth on the lowest possible number of GPUs and processors — which Enfabrica’s ACF solution enables through its high-performance converged memory and network fabric architecture.
The industry’s first, production-grade ACF switching system powered by Enfabrica silicon (produced in collaboration with partners) is an 8 Terabit/second platform enabling direct-attach of any combination of GPUs, CPUs, CXL-attached DDR5 memory and SSD storage to high-performance, multi-port 800-Gigabit-Ethernet networks. And ACF switching systems incorporate Enfabrica’s high-performance ACF-S silicon having 100 percent standards-compliant interfaces and host networking software stack components running on standard Linux kernel and userspace interfaces.
Enfabrica was started in 2020 by Rochan Sankar, Shrijeet Mukherjee and key engineers who built industry-leading silicon and software stacks at Broadcom, Google, Cisco, AWS and Intel. And the team has designed its innovative ACF devices to deliver scalable, streaming, multi-terabit-per-second data movement between GPUs, CPUs, accelerators, memory and networking devices. This solution enables customers to cut their cost of compute by an estimated 50 percent for LLM inferencing and 75 percent for DLRM inferencing at the same performance point.
KEY QUOTES:
“The fundamental challenge with today’s AI boom is the scaling of infrastructure. There’s no denying the transformative value that AI delivers to a multitude of economic sectors. But there is a critical need to bridge the exploding demand to the overall cost, efficiency, and ease of scaling AI compute, across all customers seeking to take control of their distributed AI infrastructure and services. Much of the scaling problem lies in the I/O subsystems, memory movement and networking attached to GPU compute, where Enfabrica’s ACF solution shines. Our Series B funding and investors are an endorsement of our team and product thesis, and further enable us to produce high-performance ACF silicon and software that drive up the efficient utilization and scaling of AI compute resources. As an organization, we are hyper-focused to work with the larger ecosystem of partners and customers to solve the AI infrastructure scaling problem.”
— Rochan Sankar, Enfabrica CEO and co-founder
