TORONTO, March 5, 2024 — AI chip startup Taalas Inc., has announced it has exited stealth mode and raised $50 million over two rounds of funding led by Pierre Lamond and Quiet Capital.
Taalas was founded by Tenstorrent founder Ljubisa Bajic, along with early Tenstorrent engineering leaders Drago Ignjatovic, and Lejla Bajic. The three have worked on AI processors, GPUs and CPUs for Tenstorrent, AMD and Nvidia.
Taalas said it is developing an automated flow for rapidly implementing deep learning models (transformers, SSMs, diffusers, MoEs, etc.) in silicon. The company said proprietary innovations enable one of its chips to hold an entire large AI model without requiring external memory. “The efficiency of hard-wired computation enables a single chip to outperform a small GPU data center, opening the way to a 1000x improvement in the cost of AI,” the company said.
The company is taping out its first large language model chip in the third quarter of 2024 and plans to make it available to early customers in Q1 2025.
“Artificial intelligence is like electrical power – an essential good that will need to be made available to all. Commoditizing AI requires a 1000x improvement in computational power and efficiency, a goal that is unattainable via the current incremental approaches. The path forward is to realize that we should not be simulating intelligence on general purpose computers, but casting intelligence directly into silicon. Implementing deep learning models in silicon is the straightest path to sustainable AI,” said Ljubisa Bajic, Taalas’ CEO.
“We believe the Taalas ‘direct-to-silicon’ foundry unlocks three fundamental breakthroughs: dramatically resetting the cost structure of AI today, viably enabling the next 10-100x growth in model size, and efficiently running powerful models locally on any consumer device. This is perhaps the most important mission in computing today for the future scalability of AI. And we are proud to support this remarkable n-of-1 team as they do it,” said Matt Humphrey, Partner at Quiet Capital.
“Making chips is a difficult and risky endeavour in which success requires experience, ingenuity, and persistence. Taalas’ founders have produced numerous cutting-edge chips and systems. Their track record in the industry is second to none,” said Pierre Lamond, a legend in the field, whose work across Fairchild, National Semiconductor, Sequoia, and many other organizations, helped lay the foundation of the semiconductor industry.
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