NeuReality – an AI Inference and data center infrastructure company – announced that it has raised $20 million in a new funding round from the European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund, Varana Capital, Cleveland Avenue, XT Hi-Tech and OurCrowd, with participation from Cardumen Capital, Glory Ventures and Alumni Venture Group. Including this funding round, NeuReality has raised a total of $70 million.
This funding round will accelerate the deployment of the company’s NR1 AI Inference Solution for more customers and users. This will enable NeuReality to shift faster from the early deployment phase to growth in other markets, regions, and generative AI.
This funding round also marks another major vote of confidence since the company successfully delivered its 7nm AI inference server-on-a-chip – the NR1 NAPU (Network Addressable Processing Unit) from TSMC last year — which is the fundamental component of the overall NR1 AI Inference Solution. And NeuReality’s efficient AI-centric system architecture enables companies to run generative AI applications and large language models (LLMs) without overinvesting in underutilized GPUs.
Enterprises face many other big challenges in deploying trained AI models and apps – which is known as the AI Inference process. Running live AI data for solving a task can be complex and costly, with a record of poor scalability from AI accelerators and system bottlenecks usually caused by CPUs.
NeuReality’s NR1-M and NR1-S systems – which are full-height PCIe cards that integrate easily into server racks – drive 100% AI accelerator utilization. And each system houses internal NAPUs that run on any AI accelerator and operate independently from the CPU, eliminating a CPU requirement. By hooking directly to Ethernet, NR1 efficiently manages AI queries from vast data pipelines originating from millions of users and billions of devices. Compatible server configurations were showcased by AMD, IBM, Lenovo, Qualcomm, and Supermicro at NeuReality’s product launch at the SC23 international conference in Denver last November.
Since the company’s Series A funding round in 2022, NeuReality has taken delivery of its NR1 NAPUs. And the company is working on early AI deployments with select cloud service customers and enterprise customers in financial and business services and government, focusing on current natural language processing, automated speech recognition, recommendation systems, and computer vision. This additional $20 million will accelerate NeuReality for broader AI Inference deployment as demand for conventional and GenAI applications surges.
This investment of the EIC Fund (the venture arm of the European Commission’s EIC Accelerator program) emphasizes its support for the firm’s solution – which brings optimized performance and also improved energy efficiency in AI deployment to the marketplace. The EIC investment also further addressed two important industries for Europe: advanced semiconductors and AI, both of which are expected to be drivers of economic growth in the coming years.
NeuReality already received a substantial grant from the EIC Accelerator program last year to support various development steps of the firm’s innovation aimed at solving the cost and complexity of AI Inference at its core architectural level.
KEY QUOTES:
“In order to mitigate GPU scarcity, optimization at the system and datacenter level are key. To enable greater access to compute for generative AI, we must remove market barriers to entry with a far greater sense of urgency. NeuReality’s innovative system — engineered at the data center architecture level — represents that tipping point.”
– Naveen Rao, VP of Generative AI at Databricks. Rao, a NeuReality board member, and early investor in the startup
“Our disruptive AI Inference technology is unbound by conventional CPUs, GPUs, and NICs. We didn’t try to just improve an already flawed system. Instead, we unpacked and redefined the ideal AI Inference system from top to bottom and end to end to deliver breakthrough performance, cost savings, and energy efficiency.”
“Investing in more and more DLAs, GPUs, LPUs, TPUs…won’t address your core issue of system inefficiency. It’s akin to installing a faster engine in your car to navigate through traffic congestion and dead ends — it simply won’t get you to your destination any faster. NeuReality, on the other hand, provides an express lane for large AI pipelines, seamlessly routing tasks to purpose-built AI devices and swiftly delivering responses to your customers while conserving both resources and capital.”
“We appreciate this tremendous vote of confidence from the EU and recognize that the backing of influential investors and the European Union will drive us forward as we pioneer next-gen semiconductor advancements in AI Inference. It’s a significant step towards a greener, more democratized AI future.”
– NeuReality’s CEO Moshe Tanach
“We recognize the increasing importance of the European Union’s leadership in AI and blazing a different path of high efficiency versus high spending. NeuReality’s vision and disruptive technology align with our commitment to fortifying the region’s deep tech and AI investments for a sustainable, AI-powered future.”
– Svetoslava Georgieva, chair of the EIC Fund Board
