China AI chip player Enflame raises $279m Series C

Existing investors including Tencent Holdings, Summitview Capital, Redpoint Ventures China re-upped in the round.

Established in 2018, Enflame specializes in computing power integrated circuits (ICs) used in cloud infrastructure. With the broader application of AI, there is increased demand for AI model training and reasoning, which can deliver higher computing power at low cost.

Enflame has begun mass production of its first AI high-performance general-purpose chip. It has also launched several AI computing power acceleration products for data centers - the company claims to be the first Chinese start-up to launch both cloud training and cloud reasoning products - as well as software support platforms.

These products are already being commercialized by leading customers in the internet and financial services spaces. Leiwen Yao, a managing director at Tencent Investment, said that Enflame is engaged in in-depth cooperation with Tencent based on real business scenarios.

Enflame raised a RMB700 million Series B round last May led by Summitview. this followed a RMB340 million per-Series A in 2018 and a RMB300 million Series A in 2019. These rounds were led by Tencent and Redpoint, respectively.

“Chinese chip design companies will gradually move from the fringe to the center of the market. Enflame is the first to realize the commercialization of domestic AI training chips," said Dapeng Zhu of Primavera. David Yuan, founding and managing partner of Redpoint, added that Enflame has firmly grasped its first-mover advantage in AI chips.

Other leading players in the space include Biren Technology, which raised a RMB900 million pre-Series B round in August led by GL Ventures. This came two months after a RMB1.1 billion Series A led by Qiming Venture Partners, IDG Capital and Walden International. Meanwhile, last July, VC-backed Cambricon Technology became the first Chinese AI chip manufacturer to complete an IPO.

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• Topics
• Greater China
• Technology
• Expansion
• China
• Citic Private Equity
• Primavera
• Tencent
• semiconductor
• artificial intelligence