Efficient Computer — a startup with CMU that raised $16 million in a seed funding round announced this week, expects to take volume orders for their energy efficient microchip in 2025.
The company is exploring potential business opportunities in sectors including commercial and enterprise IoT, wearables and satellites.
“In those domains the chip needs to be optimized for power consumption and it needs to be incredibly energy efficient,” Brandon Lucia, CEO and co-founder of Efficient, said.
Efficient recently produced their first test microchip which, according to them, has been able to achieve up to 100 times the energy efficiency of the average chip on the market. This chip is fully functioning, but does not feature all of the optimizations that they expect their finished product to have. They expect to produce the fully optimized chip by the end of the year.
The company recently received the $16 million round of funding led by Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm Eclipse. They have utilized this funding to grow their team to meet their year-end goal, as well as to advance development on a software stack and compiler. The software side of the company, notably the compiler, has been designed in conjunction with the hardware since the beginning of the company.
“We have been looking at all of these things together since the beginning because I once got the advice that a great way to make a hardware company fail is to just forget about software,” Lucia said. “That rings true because you need developers to buy in. You need to make it easy for more developers to more easily use the system.”
Efficient was founded in 2022 after years of research conducted at Carnegie Mellon University. They enter an industry that is estimated to be worth over $500 billion globally. Efficient says it is the first company to produce a microchip of its kind, which executes programs in parallel, as opposed to sequentially.
“How we are entering this landscape is that we are essentially developing a new category of computer architecture,” Lucia said. “This is an entirely new way of doing computation.”
