A South Korean chip designer few outside the industry have heard of just became a $2.2bn company. DeepX has signed the first tranche of a Series D round that values it at roughly four times its previous mark. And it is not finished raising.
The first slice is about $29m, from existing backers BNW Investment and DS Asset Management, Bloomberg reported. The company is in talks to raise up to $209m more by September. If that closes, DeepX would be worth as much as $2.4bn, a striking jump for a business most consumers will never knowingly use.
The Pangyo-based startup designs chip architecture tuned for AI. Its twist is where those chips are meant to run. Not in the giant data centres that train the biggest models, but on the edge: inside robots, machines and smart electronics. There, power and cost efficiency matter more than raw scale.
The bet against the data centre
Almost all the money in AI silicon has flowed one way, into the data centre and Nvidia’s GPUs. That is where the spending boom lives. DeepX is chasing the other end. As AI moves into physical devices, each one needs a chip that runs models locally. It has to be cheap, and work without pinging the cloud for every decision.
