Tel Aviv, Israel and San Jose, California based fabless semiconductor company Habana Labs announced that it $75 million in Series B funding led by Intel Capital. WRV Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Battery Ventures, and several others participated in this round.
This round of funding will fuel Habana Labs’ continued growth. Since launching, Habana Labs has now raised a total of $120 million in funding.
“We are fortunate to have attracted some of the world’s most professional investors, including the world’s leading semiconductor company, Intel,” said Habana Labs CEO David Dahan. “The funding will be used to execute on our product roadmap for inference and training solutions, including our next generation 7nm AI processors, to scale our sales and customer support teams, and it only increases our resolve to become the undisputed leader of the nascent AI processor market.”
Habana Labs is currently producing its first inference processor PCIE card called Goya. And it has been delivered to customers in multiple geographies and market segments. The Goya processor silicon has been tested since June 2018 and is now production-qualified.
Habana Labs’ Goya solution is also built with a complete hardware and software stack, including a graph compiler, hundreds of kernel libraries, and tools for integrating with the software frameworks that customers use for optimizing the deployment of AI inferencing.
Goya has set two industry records by delivering 15,012 images/second throughput with 1.3msec latency on the ResNet-50 benchmark. And it attained an efficiency record of 150 images/second/watt, which gives the technology around one to three orders of magnitude better performance than the solutions commonly deployed in data centers nowadays.
“We are excited to invest in a dynamic team with a proven track record in the industry,” added Wendell Brooks, SVP of Intel and President of Intel Capital. “Habana Labs’ innovation and execution on their vision will help drive the next evolution of Artificial Intelligence.”
