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Creator of the world's first AI Processor accelerating growth
TEL-AVIV, Israel and SAN JOSE, California, Nov. 15, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Habana Labs, Ltd. (www.habana.ai), a leading startup in the emerging AI processor space, today announced it has secured $75 million in an oversubscribed series B funding, led by Intel Capital, to fuel its continued growth. The round is joined by WRV Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Battery Ventures and others, including existing investors. Since inception, the company has raised a total of $120 million.
"We are fortunate to have attracted some of the world's most professional investors, including the world's leading semiconductor company, Intel," said David Dahan, Chief Executive Officer of Habana Labs. "The funding will be used to execute on our product roadmap for inference and training solutions, including our next generation 7nm AI processors, to scale our sales and customer support teams, and it only increases our resolve to become the undisputed leader of the nascent AI processor market."
Habana Labs has already started production of its first Goya™ inference processor PCIE card and delivered it to customers in multiple geographies and market segments. The Goya processor silicon has been tested since June of 2018 and is production-qualified by now. The Gaudi™ training processor solution is slated to sample in the second quarter of 2019.
"We are excited to invest in a dynamic team with a proven track record in the industry," said Wendell Brooks, Senior Vice President of Intel Corporation and President of Intel Capital. "Habana Labs' innovation and execution on their vision will help drive the next evolution of Artificial Intelligence."
Goya has set two industry records, by delivering 15,012 images/second throughput with 1.3msec latency on the ResNet-50 benchmark, and by attaining an unmatched power efficiency record of 150 images/second/watt, which are approximately one to three orders of magnitude better performance than solutions commonly deployed in data centers today.
"Among all AI semiconductor startups, Habana Labs is the first, and still the only one, which introduced a production-ready AI processor," said Lip-Bu Tan, Founding Partner of WRV Capital, a leading international venture firm focusing on semiconductors and related hardware, systems, and software. "We are delighted to partner with Intel in backing Habana Labs' products and its extraordinary team."
The Goya inference solution is ideally suited for the most demanding AI applications in the industry, including private and cloud data centers, autonomous vehicles, factory and warehouse automation robots, high end drones, and others.
"We decided to support Habana Labs since its early days due its ambitious and unique roadmap, with leapfrog performance and power efficiency targets, which allows it to address multiple AI applications," said Bessemer Venture Partner's Adam Fisher. "Also, their holistic platform approach that supports its silicon with production-ready adapters and the necessary software tools, reinforces our belief in their plan."
The Goya solution consists of a complete hardware and software stack, including a high-performance graph compiler, hundreds of kernel libraries, and tools necessary to integrate with the software frameworks that customers use to optimize the deployment of AI inferencing.
About Habana Labs
Habana Labs was founded in 2016 to unlock the true potential of AI by providing an order of magnitude improvements in processing performance, cost and power consumption. The company set out to develop AI processors from the ground up, optimized for the specific needs of training deep neural networks and for inference deployment in production environments. Habana Labs is a fabless semiconductor company located in Tel-Aviv, Israel and San Jose, California, employing over 120 people worldwide. It is led by top technologists and entrepreneurs that built multiple successful semiconductor companies and is backed by premier venture capitalists. For more information, please visit www.habana.ai and contact pr@habana.ai.
About Intel Capital
Intel Capital invests in innovative startups targeting artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, datacenter and cloud, 5G, next-generation compute and a wide range of other disruptive technologies. Since 1991, Intel Capital has invested US $12.3 billion in 1,544 companies worldwide, and more than 660 portfolio companies have gone public or participated in a merger. Intel Capital curates thousands of business development introductions each year between its portfolio companies and the Global 2000. For more information on what makes Intel Capital one of the world's most powerful venture capital firms, visit www.intelcapital.com or follow @Intelcapital.
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