Editor's note: In our 2024 Startups to Watch feature, the Silicon Valley Business Journal and San Francisco Business Times present startups and founders building groundbreaking products and companies in the Bay Area. Rain AI is one of 17 we profiled this year — to read more about our mission and the other startups we're featuring, click here.
With artificial intelligence eating up vast amounts of computing power and therefore electricity, the environmental toll of the technology is becoming ever more evident. Rain AI has set out to reduce this impact by making chips designed specifically for AI that are more efficient because they are modeled after the human brain. Backed by Sam Altman, Rain is making chips designed for local devices like smart homes, drones and VR headsets, allowing the device itself to handle the computing power for the AI models.
About Rain AI
- Founded: 2017
- CEO: William Passo
- Founders: Jack Kendall, Gordon Wilson, Juan Claudio Nino
- HQ: San Francisco
- Employees: 35
- Total funding: $64.04 million
What makes your chips different?
William Passo: Nvidia GPUs use what’s called the von Neumann architecture and it separates memory and processing. We as humans, however, do not separate memory and processing, we integrate them. What we are commercializing now at a high level is a non-von Neumann architecture, where we’re integrating memory and processing that allows us to get performance, energy efficiency and compute density.
What’s the timeline for launching your product?
Passo: We don’t manufacture the chips ourselves. But we have IP licensing for our designs that are going to begin in the first quarter (of 2024), and then we’ll also have, the physical accelerators or chips for customers at the end of 2024, beginning of 2025.
There was a lot of attention paid to the energy consumption of Bitcoin mining? Why do you AI gets a pass?
A good thing s that I do think it's starting to get more attention. As AI has become more mainstream, and people are using AI in their day to day lives and jobs, it is becoming more of a concern. That is what we have been working on from the beginning is reducing the energy of AI. Our ultimate goal is to be able to fit the most advanced AI models in any form factor, so a data center worth of compute in a cell phone or in a robot as to not have the energy requirements or emissions of actual data centers.
Do you feel pressure from the negative fundraising environment around startups or is AI so hot right that investment will be easy to come by?
As one data point, another AI company that is in the hardware space, a company called Lightmatter, just raised a huge round that they announced yesterday at a $1.2 billion valuation. So I think, in terms of AI, and specifically for us, it's a good time for sure. And I think it's not just one of those moments like crypto/Bitcoin/blockchain had a few years ago. I think AI is going to be a fundamental technology for the rest of our lives.
How do you feel about being an AI company based in S.F. with so much buzz around the sector?
Passo: I would say, especially in the past few months, it's been really great to be where we are in the Mission.There is a growing cluster of AI startups and in our building, we're across the hall from an AI focused VC fund called Conviction. We've also shared an office in the past few months with another AI company called Essential AI that are innovating on the foundation model side.
