EnCharge AI collects $100M in Series B capital

EnCharge AI, a three-year-old startup looking to disrupt the semiconductor design field, has secured approximately $100 million in Series B capital from investors to support the next phase of its strategy.

The company develops analog memory chips to run AI applications and workloads that require significant amounts of energy. As EnCharge sees the world, AI experiences outside of data centers are better enabled when the computations happen directly within the chip’s memory.

Tiger Global led the Series B round announced Thursday, which brings EnCharge to having collected $144 million in external investments since its 2022 launch.

For the Series B funds specifically, EnCharge plans to commercialize its first client computing-focused AI accelerator and further progress the company’s future product roadmap.

"Our Series B is a pivotal milestone for the company that signals our readiness to bring our full stack AI solutions to market in 2025,” Naveen Verma, CEO and co-founder of EnCharge, said in a release.

Verma and his partners started EnCharge in 2022 to see if devices can retain information even when they do not have power. Now the company aims to further scale out AI accelerator chips that bring memory and computation onto a single semiconductor, which is viewed as cutting energy consumption.

EnCharge’s idea behind that approach is to further push AI models out to local devices via edge computing, and thus being less dependent on cloud computing resources such as data centers.

In-Q-Tel and RTX Ventures, respectively the venture capital arms of the U.S. intelligence community and defense hardware giant RTX, are among the Series B participants worth noting given their connections to potential government end users.

RTX Ventures is continuing its involvement in EnCharge after having first backed the latter in late 2023. The idea behind that move was to look at the potential of EnCharge’s technology for use in aerospace and defense work.

“The efficiency breakthrough of EnCharge AI’s analog in-memory architecture can be transformative for defense and aerospace use cases where size, weight, and power constraints limit how AI is deployed today,” said Dan Ateya, president and managing director of RTX Ventures. “Continuing our collaboration with EnCharge AI will help enable AI advancements in environments that were previously inaccessible given the limitations of current processor technology.”

Other investors involved in the Series B round include Maverick Silicon, Capital Ten, SIP Global Partners, Zero Infinity Partners, Samsung Ventures, Constellation Technology Ventures, HH-CTBC, CTBC VC, VentureTech Alliance, Maverick Silicon, Capital TEN, SIP Global Partners, Zero Infinity Partners, CTBC VC, Vanderbilt University, Morgan Creek Digital, Anzu Partners, Scout Ventures, AlleyCorp, ACVC and S5V.