Hi everyone,

We're excited to publicly announce the Series A financing of EnCharge AI, a company based on over 6 years of R&D at Princeton University that had been operating in stealth mode throughout 2022. 

EnCharge is a company that develops semiconductor hardware and software to address the rapidly growing market for AI hardware targeted for edge computing applications (>$70B market by 2025 according to industry experts). Computing and data storage are increasingly required at the ‘edge’ – closer to the source of data – and processing technology needs to be faster and smaller, with lower energy consumption to meet this demand. These applications, including the sensors now dotting our cars, monitoring in factories and retail stores, connected cities, and defense use cases, are becoming increasingly prevalent in our lives. 

EnCharge AI raised $21.7 million in this Series A financing round led by Anzu, with participation from AlleyCorp, Scout Ventures, Silicon Catalyst Angels, Schams Ventures, E14 Fund, and Alumni Ventures. The funding will be used to further develop the semiconductor hardware and software stack, begin initial engagements and sampling with partners, and continue to build the technical and commercial team.

Breakthrough technology enabling a step-change in computing efficiency:

EnCharge's new "charged-based in-memory computing" technology, developed over the past 6 years at Princeton University with funding from DARPA and the Department of Defense, offers a potential order of magnitude size, weight, power, and cost savings in delivering AI applications while still maintaining high accuracy. By removing the need to shuttle data back-and-forth between computation and memory, EnCharge plans to provide products in the same form factor as an NVIDIA GPU but with 10 times or more AI performance. Functionally, this innovation aims to enable the replacement of an entire rack of server units that consumes tens of kiloWatts of power with a smaller (like an electric vehicle fast charger), more efficient solution that uses only a fraction of the power (like a toaster).

Many digital accelerators on the market today struggle to keep up with the rapid pace of performance increase required as AI models grow larger and more complex, doubling in size and complexity roughly every 3 months. EnCharge's technology offers an order of magnitude efficiency improvement compared to the best-in-class product on the market today and among emerging technologies from competitors. The founding team has also demonstrated the technology in several real chips in the last 6 years and worked with TSMC at advanced semiconductor technology nodes to de-risk its products. 

Reconfigurable hardware and software stack can be applied to a wide variety of applications:

Applications driving the rapid growth in AI inference include a wide range of use cases such as automation systems for retail and marketing, computer vision for high-definition cameras, and lidar and image processing for autonomous vehicles. The increased adoption of 5G will further blur the boundaries between cloud and edge computing, enabling more AI-powered applications to take advantage of EnCharge's products. EnCharge's technology is particularly suited for initial applications with power, energy, and space constraints at the edge.

Led by a world-class, multi-disciplinary team:

EnCharge AI was founded by a trio of AI and semiconductor industry leaders - Naveen Verma, Kailash Gopalakrishnan, and Echere Iroaga. Dr. Verma is a world-renowned AI systems and hardware researcher and has served on the technical advisory boards of major semiconductor companies. He is joined by Dr. Gopalakrishnan, formerly an IBM Fellow and leader of IBM's AI hardware and software efforts, and Dr. Iroaga, with over 25 years of semiconductor experience at companies such as MACOM and Qualcomm. The founders have attracted an all-star team of AI semiconductor & systems experts including executives and engineers from NVIDIA, AMD, Waymo, Intel, Meta, SambaNova, and Cerebras. 

Encharge AI's leadership team (left to right): Naveen Varma , Chief Executive Officer, Echere Iroaga, Chief Operating Officer, and Kailash Gopalakrishnan, Chief Product Officer

The EnCharge AI team is already one of the most impressive executive and engineering teams that we have seen in recent memory.

The launch and funding announcement received strong media coverage in TechCrunch, Reuters, SiliconANGLE, eeNews Europe and many other publications.

We are proud to support EnCharge's journey as they bring their innovative technology to market and drive the adoption of AI at the edge. Please feel free to reach out with any questions and we always welcome suggestions for potential partners/customers.

Best,

Jimmy Kan, Partner, and Cathryn Paine, Principal, People

PORTFOLIO COMPANY UPDATES

Anzu Fund I Portfolio Company Edge Precision Manufacturing was Acquired by Zeon Corporation

On December 28, 2022, Zeon Corporation, through its subsidiary Zeon Specialty Materials Inc., purchased 100% of the shares of Edge Precision Manufacturing, a manufacturer of micro featured thermoplastic devices.

ZEON's COPs (product names ZEONEX® and ZEONOR®), well known for their unique properties such as low autofluorescence, high light transmittance, low biomolecules adsorption, low impurities, and low melt viscosity, have been the leading material used for microscale and microfluidic and biochemical analysis applications

The business combination will allow Edge to complete its transition to large-scale manufacturing of disposable microfeatured thermoplastic parts for medical, diagnostics, and optics applications.

South 8 Technologies, 6K, and Voltaiq Attended the AABC Conference in San Diego

The AABC conference is held every year in San Diego and reviews the status of automotive battery technology and provides informed glimpses into the future. The event had led tutorials, roundtable discussions, and various keynote speeches.

During the conference, Cyrus Rustomji, CEO of South 8 Technologies presented on the advantages of South 8’s LiGas system, Voltaiq hosted a networking happy hour and delivered several presentations on battery analytics.

The 6K team sponsored a booth showcasing their process for sustainable production of battery material

BioSkryb’s Technology was Highlighted in a Webinar hosted by Illumina Scientific

BioSkryb and Illumina presented a webinar on "Clonal evolution in breast cancer: application of ultra-deep single cell multiomic sequencing" featuring Shelley Hwang, MD, MPH, and Jeffrey R. Marks, Ph.D. from Duke University.

In this discussion, they shared data associated with BioSkryb's single cell, multiomic approach to elucidate the underpinnings of DCIS breast cancer evolution and show how this multiomic analysis uncovers an isolated cell population with an epithelial-to-mesenchymal gene expression signature, providing an example of a single cell state that could be directly relevant in the transition from DCIS to invasive cancer.

ANZU UPDATES

41st Annual J.P. Morgan Health Care Conference

Anzu is excited to attend the 41st Annual J.P. Morgan Health Care Conference on January 9-12th in San Francisco, CA. Several members of our team will be in attendance including one of our Managing Partners, David Michael, and Principal, Jaione Maiz, Ph.D.  

If you are attending and interested in meeting the Anzu team, please contact Jessica Terlizzi.

ADDITIONAL PC MEDIA COVERAGE

• Excision Biotherapeutics’ work was referenced in a New York Times piece about CRISPR gene editing and in a Metro Weekly piece. Excision’s SVP of R&D, Jennifer Gordon, was named to ENDPOINTS News’ list of 20 women blazing trails in biopharma R&D

• Voltaiq’s Battery Materials Scientist, Nicole Schauser was named to the Automotive News’ 2022 All Stars List and CEO Tal Sholklapper was quoted in another Automotive News piece about how data analytics can help unlock battery bottlenecks

• BioFlyte was mentioned in an Albuquerque Business First piece about the top funding rounds in New Mexico in 2022

CAREER OPPORTUNITIES

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Browse the open roles here and learn more about joining our amazing teams.

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ABOUT ANZU PARTNERS

Anzu Partners is an investment firm that focuses on industrial and life science technology companies with the potential to transform their industries. Anzu works with entrepreneurs to develop and commercialize technological innovations by providing capital alongside deep expertise in business development, market positioning, IP, global connectivity, and operations. For more information, please visit https://anzupartners.com/.