The pitch is bold for a seed round. Infinity says it can strip away the one advantage that has kept Nvidia untouchable. It has just raised money to try.
The company closed a $15 million seed round at a $100 million valuation on Monday, it announced. Backers include Touring Capital, Principal VC, executives at major chip firms, and researchers from OpenAI and Anthropic.
The CUDA problem
To understand what Infinity is chasing, look at why Nvidia won. Its chips are quick, but its real moat is CUDA, the software layer it has built up over nearly two decades.
The big AI frameworks, PyTorch and TensorFlow, sit on top of CUDA. Write your app in Python and it runs on Nvidia hardware by default. That convenience is why Nvidia holds an estimated 80% of the data-centre AI accelerator market.
