China AI chipset maker Cambricon raises $100m
Cambricon Technologies, a Beijing-based artificial intelligence (AI) developer, has raised a $100 million Series A round of financing from Lenovo Capital & Incubator Group (LCIG), and an investment unit owned by Alibaba Group.
Other new investors include government-backed State Development & Investment Corporation (SDIC) and CAS Investment Management – an investment unit of Chinese Academy of Science – as well as Chinese data analysis firm Zhongke Tuling Technology. Angel round investors Oriza Seed Fund and Yonghua Capital also re-upped. The latest round valued the company at over $1 billion, it said.
Cambricon was founded by Tianshi Chen, a professor at the CAS Institute of Computing Technology. The company launched the Cambricon-1A processor last year, which it claims to be the world’s first commercial chip to stimulate human nerve cells and synapses for deep learning. The product – which is designed to perform at a high efficiency with less power – can be used in a variety of hardware devices such as smartphones, security monitoring equipment, drones, and autonomous vehicles.
The company currently has two R&D centers in Beijing and Shanghai. The latest investment will be used to commercialize its processors, as well as to develop similar technology for cloud-computing platforms.
LCIG is the principal investment arm of Chinese technology company Lenovo Group. The company invests in core technology and internet-related areas, including cloud computing, big data, AI and robotics.
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