AI infrastructure company Infinity announced a $15 million raise at a $100 million valuation on Monday from investors including Touring Capital, Principal VC, and researchers from companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic. The startup is building software to make it easier for AI chips to run AI models. One big reason Nvidia became the top player is not just its high-performance chips, but also its CUDA software (Compute Unified Device Architecture), which allows its GPUs (originally designed to run graphics) to act as general-purpose processing CPUs. The largest AI development frameworks PyTorch and TensorFlow have been built on top of CUDA. This allows developers to write their apps in popular languages like Python, use those major AI frameworks and their apps will, by default, run on Nvidia chips.
Most of these app-level startups wouldn’t have the resources or know-how to write their own kernels — the low-level software that operates chips — and port their apps to other AI chips. So Infinity is trying to build CUDA-alternative kernel software that works with any type of chip, like SRAM, GPUs, phone chips, and Systolic Arrays. Infinity is part of a new wave of startups that are attempting, product by product, to chip away at Nvidia’s market dominance.
