China chip designer Biren gets $410m Series B

Other investors include Source Code Capital, state-backed Guosheng Group, Harvest Capital Management, China Merchants Capital, BAI, CITIC Securities Investment, Yijing Capital, Greater Bay Area Homeland Investments, Russia-China Investment Fund, MSA Capital, and China Growth Capital. IDG Capital, V Fund and state-owned Zhuhai Da Heng Qin Company re-upped.

Biren has raised RMB4.7 billion since its inception in 2019. It raised RMB1.1 billion in Series A funding led by Qiming Venture Partners, IDG Capital and Walden International in June 2020. This was followed by a RMB900 million pre-Series B led by GL Ventures last August.

Biren was founded by Wen Zhang, a former president of artificial intelligence (AI) developer SenseTime. A source close to the company told AVCJ that the technology team is from Huawei’s US research team. The company plans to first focus on high-performance computing chips for use in general-purpose cloud-based processes. GPU (graphics processing unit) chips are the main target.

“GPUs are promising in cloud-based AI computing, as well as in edge computing and mobile terminals. The value of GPUs has been more and more recognized and valued. Biren has gathered top talents and technological innovations in the global GPU industry and is currently one of the very few companies in China that can produce general-purpose GPU chips with international standards,” said Hongru Zhou, a partner of Country Garden.

It extends a spate of recent funding in the GPU space, with Iluvatar CoreX raising RMB1.2 billion and Moore Threads closing two rounds amounting to several billion renminbi.

However, some investors, such as See Fund founder Song Yao, believe that GPUs, as general-purpose chips, have insurmountable disadvantages. “Their power consumption is very high, so in scenarios with heat dissipation limitations or battery usage, there is no way you can use GPUs. Ideally, we will design dedicated chips for different scenarios,” Yao, told AVCJ earlier this month.

To this end, Yao, who previously founded AI chip company DeePhi Technology, believes that the prevalence of Moore's Law – the ability to pack twice as many transistors on the same sliver of silicon every two years – is coming to an end. Start-ups must now sacrifice some versatility in order to thrive.

Earlier this week, CPE led a funding round for Kunlun, the semiconductor unit of Chinese search giant Baidu at a post-deal valuation of approximately RMB13 billion. Kunlun focuses on cloud-based general-purpose AI chips. Last July, VC-backed Cambricon Technology became the first Chinese AI chip manufacturer to list on Shanghai's Star Market.

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• Topics
• Greater China
• Early-stage
• Technology
• China
• semiconductor
• Source Code Capital
• China Growth Capital
• IDG capital
• V Fund
• Bertelsmann Asia Investments
• CITIC Securities