At the Last Futurist, we have been covering Canadian startups that are maturing faster than usual during the pandemic, and for a few years we've been saying how Toronto is one of the next AI-center of the world.

Untethered AI who claims to be a leader in at-memory computation and AI inference acceleration, yesterday announced an oversubscribed $125 million funding round led by an affiliate of Tracker Capital Management, LLC ("Tracker Capital"), a stage-agnostic venture capital investor that principally invests in high-potential technology growth companies.

It also saw participation from new investor Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), and Untether's other previous investors, including Toronto's Radical Ventures.

  • Founded in 2018, Untether AI provides "ultra-efficient, high-performance" AI hardware.
  • The startup says its chip technology can be used in a variety of applications, including banking and financial services, natural language processing, autonomous vehicles, smart cities, and retail.

"AI has become a key enabling technology for many industries and Untether AI's novel compute architecture has the potential to accelerate adoption across a number of use cases providing a strong value proposition to its customers," said Leon Pedersen, Managing Director, Head of Thematic Investing, CPP Investments.

Traditional artificial intelligence chips use just a small fraction of their power for AI processing; most goes to data transfer processes, Iyengar said. Untether's chips are more efficient, freeing up power that can be used directly for AI processing, he said.

They have around 47 employees according to LinkedIn data. You can visit their website here. The $120 Million Canadian is around 10x what they had previously raised. That Intel has come in in a big way is quite significant.

Architecting the Next Generation of AI Compute

The dramatic increase in the usage of AI, along with its heavy computational requirements, is overwhelming traditional compute architectures, and drastically increasing power consumption in datacenters. Untether AI's at-memory compute architecture breaks through the computational bottleneck and changes the paradigm for AI compute efficiency. Untether AI's tsunAImi accelerator cards powered by runAI devices provide record-breaking energy efficiency and compute density for inference acceleration. The new funding enables the company to extend its leadership position, enhance its software offering, and build its next generation products.

Expanding Engagements in Multiple Markets

With this latest funding round, Untether AI will be well-positioned to accelerate and expand its customer engagements across a multitude of markets. Since at-memory computation is both general purpose and extremely energy efficient, it can be used in a variety of industries and applications, including banking and financial services; natural language processing; autonomous vehicles; smart city and retail; and other applications that require high-throughput and low-latency AI acceleration.

  • Untether AI has developed a groundbreaking new chip architecture for neural net inference that eliminates the data movement bottleneck that costs energy and performance in traditional architectures.
  • Untether AI provides ultra-efficient, high-performance AI chips to enable new frontiers in AI applications. By combining the power efficiency of at-memory computation with the robustness of digital processing.

The company has somewhat grown up during the pandemic and plans to use the fresh capital to expand its current product reach and accelerate the development of its next-generation products, attacking "a multitude of markets."

  • At-memory computing
  • High compute density

The company headcount has grown by 7% in the last six months and we can expect this to grow with the new funding. Founded in Toronto in 2018, Untether AI is now funded by Tracker Capital, Intel Capital, CPP Investments, and Radical Ventures with a promising trajectory for an AI based chip architecture.