By Max A. Cherney
SAN FRANCISCO, Dec 2 (Reuters) – Startup Vinci said on Tuesday it has raised $36 million to fund its business building software that can accelerate the design of chips and other hardware by significantly speeding up the simulation of such devices.
The Palo Alto, California-based company’s software enters a crowded market with similar artificial intelligence-based simulation products made by established chip software design companies such as Cadence and Synopsys.
Vinci said its simulation software uses an internally built AI model to increase the speed of chip simulation.
It will first pursue heat simulation and then expand to other areas. Advanced AI chips generate enormous amounts of heat to the point that Nvidia’s latest systems require liquid cooling for many of the configurations.
Vinci CEO Hardik Kabaria said in an interview with Reuters that its AI-powered software is able to improve simulation speeds without the errors often generated by large language models, which industry people describe as hallucinations. The software can run simulations at virtually any point in the chip design process, he said.
Kabaria declined to identify current customers but said Vinci is conducting pilot programs with several major chip companies and that 10 chip companies have benchmarked the software.
The $36 million Series A funding round was led by Xora Innovation, and other investors included Khosla Ventures and Eclipse. The company has raised a total of $46 million to date. Vinci did not discuss its valuation.
The company has about 25 employees and plans to adopt a usage-based model to generate revenue.
(Reporting by Max A. Cherney in San Francisco; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)
