Esperanto Technologies Secures $58 Million in Series B Investment for AI Chips
Summary
Esperanto president and CEO Dave Ditzel stated, "Despite still operating largely in stealth mode, we appreciate this strong show of support from strategic and VC investors who had confidential briefings about our plans and believe we have a compelling solution for accelerating ML applications. " "Next-generation applications in machine learning, AI, and real-time analytics require the highest levels of performance and optimization for these advanced workloads," commented Martin Fink, CTO of Western Digital. " In November 2017, Western Digital announced that it had made a strategic investment in Esperanto, and that it intends to transition its own consumption of processors – two billion cores per year – to RISC-V. Esperanto was founded by Dave Ditzel, well-known entrepreneur and visionary in the computer and semiconductor industry and co-author of the seminal paper, "The Case for RISC," with professor David Patterson, recent recipient of the Turing Award – the Nobel Prize of computing. Ditzel previously founded and was CEO of Transmeta, maker of low-power x86 microprocessors using Code Morphing Software; was vice president and chief architect for Intels Hybrid Parallel Computing; and was Sun Microsystems CTO for their SPARC Technology Business. Esperanto has brought together a seasoned team of experienced processor and software engineers with the goal of making RISC-V the architecture of choice for compute-intensive applications such as AI and ML.