Commenting Gordon Wilson, CEO and co-founder, said that while most AI chips on the market are digital, Rain's technology is analogue. Such devices are capable of deciphering incremental information such as sound waves.
"It's about looking at the brain first for clues to inform how we can build a new substrate of computation," said Wilson. "By building neural circuits, we can achieve extraordinary efficiency and extraordinary scale simultaneously."
Rain has joined a growing list of US start-ups that have been raising funds including the likes of SambaNova Systems, Groq, and Cerebras Systems, in a market that has traditionally been dominated by the likes of Nvidia.
According to a key investor, Sam Altman, the company's "neuromorphic approach could vastly reduce the costs of creating powerful AI models and will hopefully one day help to enable true artificial general intelligence."
Rain's chips have been designed with the addition of a memristor on top of silicon wafers which serves as 'artificial synapses' that allow for the processing and memory to happen in the same place, and which makes AI algorithms much faster and more energy-efficient.
According to the company the additional funds will be sued to expand its engineering team as it looks to take its prototype chip to the next stage of development.
This round was led by Prosperity 7 Ventures, a venture capital fund of Aramco Ventures.
