Artificial intelligence chipmaker Mythic Inc. continues to ascend to new heights, announcing May 11 it had closed a $70 million series C funding round.
Leading the way were institutional luminaries BlackRock Inc. (NYSE: BLK), the New York City-based investment firm that is the world’s largest asset manager with roughly $8.7 trillion under its care, and Houston-headquartered Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (NYSE: HPE). New investors included Alumni Ventures Group and UDC Ventures.
Mythic now has raised $165.2 million to date. The company in 2019 obtained a $30 million investment from Lockheed Martin Ventures, the investment arm of Lockheed Martin Corp. (NYSE: LMT). The defense contractor also invested in Mythic in 2018.
“Customers are finding that powerful AI leads to significant differentiation of their products, and our cost-effective solution lets them deploy AI at an unprecedented scale,” Mythic co-founder, Chairman and CEO Mike Henry said in a statement. “We are thrilled to have a world-class firm like BlackRock lead this round, allowing us to massively scale up the production of our solutions, invest in our technology roadmap and better serve the needs of our current and future customers across many different verticals.”
Henry developed an AI model based on the manipulation of electrical currents, rather than classical methods of computation such as processors and memory. The startup’s chips perform computation inside memory cells. Mythic executives say that design enables performance at the level of a graphics processor unit, but at one one-hundredth of the power and cost. The company’s hardware and software platform turn devices into so-called intelligent assistants, unconnected to the cloud. Read more here about Mythic's AI architecture.
Silicon Valley Business Journal reported that approach differentiates from traditional power players in the space, such as Nvidia Corp., and places Mythic in a class of companies trying to push chip design into a new realm, alongside the likes of SambaNova Systems Inc., Groq Inc. and Cerebras Systems Inc. SambaNova raised $676 million at a $5 billion valuation last month and Groq scored $300 million at a valuation of more than $1 billion.
Mythic said it would apply part of the fresh capital to accelerating mass production of its “AI inference solutions,” and “develop its next generation hardware platform and build out its software portfolio.”
Customers include Lockheed Martin and are based throughout the world.
“Mythic is perfectly positioned to take advantage of the rapidly-growing demand for AI with the company’s groundbreaking analog compute technology, strong leadership team, and go-to-market strategy targeting a wide variety of industries,” said Paul Glaser, vice president and head of Hewlett Packard Pathfinder, in a statement. “We are thrilled to co-lead this latest investment round as Mythic continues to drive the mass adoption of AI in edge devices.”
The company in 2018 inked a 17,256-square-foot, three-year lease at 1905 A Kramer Lane. Carl Condon and Jeff Bodenman of Avison Young represented Mythic in negotiations for the new lease, while Sam Owen of Stream Realty represented the landlord, RREEF Management.
Henry and Chief Technology Officer Dave Fick co-founded Mythic at the University of Michigan’s Integrated Circuit Lab in 2012 and moved to Austin in 2015. The company also has an office in Redwood City, California. Henry lives in California, while Fick lives in the Texas capital. The hardware and chip team are based primarily in Austin, with the software team mostly on the West Coast.
Cromwell Schubarth with Silicon Valley Business Journal contributed reporting.
