Semiconductor Startup Raises $36M for AI, IoT InnovationSemiconductor Startup Raises $36M for AI, IoT Innovation

Semiconductor technology startup Baya Systems has raised more than $36 million in a series B funding round led by Maverick Silicon and including Synopsys and existing investors Matrix Partners and Intel Capital. 

Baya Systems, which is focused on accelerating intelligent computing for AI, IoT and other applications, said the financing will support development and deployment of the company’s software-driven system IP technology portfolio for system-on-chips (SoC).

The company expects to tap into a growing trend driven by AI and IoT whereby system on chips functions are no longer miniaturized on a single chip but rather there is a "system-of-chips" working together to enable performance to scale while optimizing power and cost.

Such chiplets could offer scalable performance, optimized power and reduced costs, the company said. This would support increasing AI capabilities, more efficient data movement and increased compute density, without relying solely on single chips, for which innovation is proving elusive with increasing costs.

Baya said it can address existing challenges with chiplets, which includes working seamlessly while processing data quickly with minimal latency, as well as efficient resource management, with a software-based design and exploration platform.

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The platform would enable semiconductor companies to design chiplets and other technologies that could keep up with AI and next-generation compute, it said. 

Founder and CEO of Baya Systems Sailesh Kumar said designing increasingly complex combinations of CPUs, GPUs, neural network accelerators and other processors is a brute-force solution that the industry cannot rely on forever. 

“It simply comes with too many risks: high re-engineering costs, difficulty scaling and potentially hitting the market with sub-par metrics,” he said. 

Baya’s advanced system IP portfolio supports custom and standard protocols, maximizes performance and throughput while minimizing latency, silicon footprint and power, rapidly delivering complex solutions, the company added. 

Managing director at investor Maverick Silicon, Andrew Homan said Baya is uniquely positioned to fill a critical gap in the industry with its WeaverPro, WeaveIP and other technologies.

WeaverPro, for example, enables continuous refinement of data-driven architecture and microarchitecture development from initial specification through post-silicon tuning, with built-in simulation and workload analysis.

“Advances in computing such as generative AI and multimodal compute have shown that the real challenge has transitioned from compute engines to data movement and connectivity to truly deliver on the performance and efficiency needs of AI acceleration and scale compute infrastructure and communications,” Homan said.

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Stan Reiss, general partner at Matrix Partners, said Baya Systems, whose leaders and engineers came from Apple, AMD, Arm, Intel and Qualcomm, has executed ahead of schedule on building the team, the technology and the products that deliver on its vision to solve the high-performance system design challenge for the semiconductor industry.

This article first appeared in IoT World Today's sister publication AI Business.