Velaura AI, a chip-design startup focused on reducing power consumption in data centres, said on Tuesday it raised $110 million in Series A funding at a valuation above $1 billion, according to a recent report by Reuters. The round was led by Seligman Ventures, with participation from new investor Capricorn Investment Group and existing backers Samsung Catalyst Fund, StepStone Group, and Maverick Silicon.
Velaura develops low-power chips and software for data centres and physical AI applications, including robotics and autonomous systems. The company said the capital will be used to accelerate development and deployment of its products and to hire engineers and customer-facing staff.
Earlier this year, Velaura announced Titan Core, a chip-design platform intended to deliver efficiency gains in data centre workloads. Chief executive Rajiv Khemani said the next era of AI will be shaped by compute economics, not just better models. He told Reuters the company is in discussions with three of the four largest cloud providers as potential customers, though he declined to name them. Velaura said its technology has already been deployed in more than 30 million chips.
The startup charges an upfront fee plus royalties tied to customer power savings, a model Khemani said resembles Arm’s per-chip licensing before Arm began selling its own chips. Umesh Padval, managing partner at Seligman Ventures, said Velaura stands to benefit from rising data centre power demands and growing interest in energy-efficient computing for robotics.
