XCENA raises $135M for its computational memory controller
XCENA Inc., a startup with a memory device designed to speed up artificial intelligence clusters, today announced that it has raised $135 million in funding.
The Series B round was led by Korean funds Atinum Investment and IMM Investment. XCENA says that the raise also included contributions from more than a half dozen other institutional backers. The company is now valued at $570 million.
XCENA was founded in 2022 by former employees of Samsung Electronics Co. and SK hynix Inc., the world’s top suppliers of memory for graphics cards. XCENA’s flagship product is a device called the MX1 that it describes as a computational memory controller. It’s designed to speed up the data management tasks involved in running AI inference workloads.
Large language models use a data structure called a KV cache to interpret user prompts. When the KV cache can’t fit in a graphics card’s built-in memory, it has to be offloaded to slower external DRAM, which creates processing delays. A similar issue affects the vector databases that many LLMs use to store information.
