NeuReality, an Israeli AI hardware startup that is working on a novel approach to improving AI inferencing platforms by doing away with the current CPU-centric model, is coming out of stealth today and announcing an $8 million seed round. The group of investors includes Cardumen Capital, crowdfunding platform OurCrowd and Varana Capital. The company also today announced that Naveen Rao, the GM of Intel’s AI Products Group and former CEO of Nervana System (which Intel acquired), is joining the company’s board of directors.

The founding team, CEO Moshe Tanach, VP of operations Tzvika Shmueli and VP for very large-scale integration Yossi Kasus, has a background in AI but also networking, with Tanach spending time at Marvell and Intel, for example, Shmueli at Mellanox and Habana Labs and Kasus at Mellanox, too.

It’s the team’s networking and storage knowledge and seeing how that industry built its hardware that now informs how NeuReality is thinking about building its own AI platform. In an interview ahead of today’s announcement, Tanach wasn’t quite ready to delve into the details of NeuReality’s architecture, but the general idea here is to build a platform that will allow hyperscale clouds and other data center owners to offload their ML models to a far more performant architecture where the CPU doesn’t become a bottleneck.

“We kind of combined a lot of techniques that we brought from the storage and networking world,” Tanach explained. Think about traffic manager and what it does for Ethernet packets. And we applied (Read more...)