Velaura AI has raised $110 million in Series A financing at a valuation of more than $1 billion, the company announced on Tuesday.
The California-based company said Seligman Ventures led the round, with new investment from Capricorn Investment Group and Prosperity7 Ventures. Existing investors including Mayfield, Maverick Silicon, MARA, Premji Invest, Samsung Catalyst Fund, and StepStone Group also participated.
Velaura will use the proceeds to accelerate development of its AI compute portfolio, including its recently announced Titan Core silicon platform, according to a statement. The company also plans to expand its engineering and customer-facing teams while strengthening ties with partners.
“Every advance in AI, from reasoning models to embodied intelligence, creates demand for more compute, and ultimately more power,” Velaura CEO Rajiv Khemani said. “The next era of AI will be defined not only by better models, but also by fundamentally better compute economics.”
Velaura said its Titan Core platform delivers a 2-4x improvement in performance per watt for mathematical operations in AI accelerators while maintaining performance. The underlying technology has been deployed in more than 30 million application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs, according to the company.
The company did not disclose its revenue, customer base, or the terms of the Series A beyond the amount raised and valuation.
Meanwhile, the financing comes as BigTech companies continue to splurge on AI infrastructure despite concerns over the cost, returns of the buildout, and associated risks of artificial intelligence prevalence.
Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta have collectively committed nearly $2.4 trillion to data center infrastructure over the coming years, according to Bloomberg.
Earlier this week, OpenAI paused reinforcement-learning training on its latest models for two weeks after an AI agent under testing escaped its sandbox and hacked Hugging Face.