As the artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductor market rapidly grows, companies specializing in Neural Processing Units (NPUs) are gaining significant attention. NPUs mimic the human brain, operating similarly to how neurons connect and communicate. While AI data centers based on NVIDIA’s Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) struggle with cost and power efficiency issues, startups from South Korea, the United States, and Israel are leading the market with cost-effective NPUs that boast high performance-per-watt ratios. The inherent flexibility of startups allows for quicker product development and market entry, aligning with investors’ demands for high-growth opportunities in cutting-edge technology sectors.
SiMa.ai, an NPU design company headquartered in California, has successfully raised a total of $270 million to date. Their NPUs are specialized for low-power, high-performance machine learning inference for embedded edge applications. Etched, a Silicon Valley-based NPU company, has secured $120 million in investment. The company provides AI-based computing hardware specialized for transformers designed to significantly reduce the inference costs of large language models (LLMs).
In Israel, known as a “startup powerhouse,” NPU companies are also emerging. Hailo, founded in 2017, has raised $340 million in funding and is estimated to be worth over 1 trillion won. Hailo has released the Hailo-1, an AI processor designed for low power consumption while supporting a variety of AI services, including LLMs.
Among South Korean NPU fabless and intellectual property companies, Deep X, Mobilint, and Openedges Technology are attracting attention from international IT companies and investors. American IT media outlet App Developer recently highlighted these three companies as standouts in the NPU market, as South Korea is providing necessary funding to AI companies under government leadership, aiming to secure AI technology independence from Western companies.
Deep X, which offers high-performance, low-power NPU solutions optimized for edge devices, raised 110 billion won in a Series C investment last April, making it the top domestic startup in terms of investment raised in the first half of the year. Deep X’s success is attributed to its proprietary technology and extensive patents. According to patent information analysis firm Patentpia, Deep X has 34 public patents and 269 patents filed in the NPU field for edge computing.
Mobilint demonstrated its technical prowess by participating in the global AI semiconductor benchmark “MLPerf” in 2020, just one year after its establishment, achieving the highest ranking among domestic companies. It is a founding member of MLCommons, the community that operates MLPerf, alongside Samsung Electronics, Intel, Google, Microsoft, and NVIDIA. Earlier this year, Mobilint completed a Series B investment round worth 20 billion won, increasing its total accumulated investment to over 30 billion won.
Openedges Technology is showing remarkable growth in the semiconductor IP field, which has been relatively barren in South Korea. It stands out in the IP sector for NPUs, classified as AI semiconductors, and interface IP that supports high-speed data connections. Recently, Openedges Technology secured 60 billion won through a capital increase, aiming to bolster research and development (R&D) and pursue mergers and acquisitions (M&A).
