AI infrastructure startup XCENA has raised $135 million in a Series B round at a $570 million valuation, bringing its total funding to $185 million as investors look for ways to reduce the soaring costs of running generative AI systems, TechCrunch reported Friday.
The funding round was co-led by Altinum and IMM Investment, with participation from Corstone Asia, SBI Investment, and Mirae Asset Capital.
XCENA was founded in 2022 by CEO Jin Kim, CTO Dohun Kim, and CPO Harry Juhyun Kim, all former executives at Samsung and SK Hynix, two of the world’s largest memory chip makers.
The startup is focused on one of AI’s growing pain points: memory bottlenecks. Every AI query requires data to move repeatedly between memory, CPUs, and GPUs, forcing systems to rely on expensive, power-hungry processors throughout the inference process.
XCENA’s solution is a chip that performs compute tasks closer to DRAM, the fast memory processors actively use, reducing the need for constant transfers between hardware components.
