Artificial intelligence computer chip startup Mythic said today it has closed on a $30 million funding round led by Valor Equity Partners.

Future Ventures, Atreides, Micron Ventures and Lam Research also participated in the Series B-1round, a second phase of its previously announced B round, along with several existing investors, bringing its total funding to $70 million.

Mythic says AI systems are only as good as the available memory they can access, so its goal has been to find a way to make that memory more accessible and efficient for AI-powered devices.

To do so, the company has turned to older analog computing technology. It has built tiny intelligent processing unit chips that help AI systems to sift through their memory faster, and perform inference more rapidly than newer digital-based chips can do. Inference is the process of running a trained AI model.

Mythic said the idea is to bring the power of the data center to embedded devices and smart machines.

The latest funding round will help the company introduce its chips to the market, Mythic co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Mike Henry said in a statement. “This new financing round underscores our belief that Mythic will play a leading role in the explosive deployment of AI products both in the datacenter and at the edge,” he added.

Mythic, which launched in 2012 but only emerged from stealth mode a couple of years ago, said it wants to make AI more accessible to everyone. It reckons that digital computing can’t do this because today’s graphics processing units use far too much power when performing their calculations. Mythic’s chips instead rely on analog currents and flash memory to perform their inference calculations more efficiently.

The company makes some big claims, saying its analog chips can access memory using just a 100th of the power and cost of digital chips. Its chips are small enough and cheap enough to fit inside pretty much any device, including smartphones, drones, robots, self-driving cars, wearable devices and virtual reality headsets.

They’re able to crunch data and make conclusions themselves, rather than sending data back to cloud-based data centers to perform the computations there. What that means is that Mythic is targeting the emerging field of “edge computing,” where AI workloads are shifted to the periphery of the network. Its vision is to have its chips power advances in everything from smart cities to autonomous vehicles.

“Powerful AI applications will continue to expand across markets, from data centers to the edge,” said René Hartner, vice president of corporate business development at Micron Technology Inc. “Mythic’s unique and efficient compute-in-memory technology helps accelerate near real-time analytics and insights that deliver on the promise of Industrial IoT.”

Mythic said it hopes to have its first products ready to ship to strategic and early-access customers by the end of the year.

Image: Mythic