Mosaic SoC, a Zurich-based semiconductor startup building dedicated perception chips for AR glasses and other energy-constrained consumer devices, has raised a $3.8 million pre-seed round led by Founderful with participation from Kick Foundation. The company was founded by Moritz Scherer and Alfio Di Mauro, both PhDs from ETH Zurich with deep expertise in system-on-chip architecture.
The company addresses a structural gap in the consumer device market: devices are gaining cameras and sensors faster than they are gaining the intelligence to use them. Current approaches to spatial intelligence require power-hungry application processors and GPUs that make truly wearable form factors impractical. Mosaic SoC’s dedicated perception chip delivers real-time understanding of position and surroundings at a fraction of the energy, enabling always-on spatial awareness in smart glasses indistinguishable from regular glasses, as well as smartphone co-processors for always-on tracking and classification.
The chip builds a local map of a device’s surroundings and the objects within them in real time, enabling features such as recalling where an item was last seen or generating a floorplan on the fly. Its proprietary multi-core architecture with eight or more cores maximizes performance per watt, and the company ships a full application layer that ODM partners can integrate and build on top of, removing rather than adding complexity. In its first year, the company has already generated meaningful revenue through NRE contracts with ODM partners.
KEY QUOTES:
“Spatial intelligence shouldn’t require an application-class processor and a GPU. We built Mosaic SoC to deliver real-time perception at a fraction of the energy, so battery-powered devices can understand their environment without compromising form factor.”
Alfio Di Mauro, CEO and Co-Founder, Mosaic SoC
“The next billion smart devices will see and understand the world around them. Mosaic SoC’s product is the chip that makes that possible at scale. Moritz and Alfio have the architecture, the platform vision, and the team to make it happen.”
Antonia Albert, Investor, Founderful
