Efficient Computer lands $97M at $650M for dataflow chips

Efficient Computer, the Carnegie Mellon spinout building chips based on dataflow architecture, closed a $97 million Series B at a $650 million valuation, Reuters reported. TQ Ventures led the round, with Eclipse, Union Square Ventures, Toyota Ventures and others participating. The round brings total funding to $173 million, arriving only seven months after a $60 million Series A.

The pitch is 10 to 100 times more energy efficiency than Intel or Nvidia architectures on general-purpose workloads. The company's first production processor, Electron E1, is now shipping in volume, aimed at small robots and autonomous drones that run on batteries rather than wall power.

Dataflow chips are not new. They have "bounced around academic literature for decades without commercial traction," according to Reuters, largely because they are hard to program for the wide variety of tasks conventional CPUs handle. Efficient, run by CEO and co-founder Brandon Lucia, a Carnegie Mellon professor, says it rebuilt both the silicon and the compiler toolchain from scratch to close that gap. "We sort of thread the needle where we're easy to program, fast and efficient," Lucia told Reuters.

The stated next step is scaling the Fabric architecture toward datacenter-class parts, at what Efficient claims will be more than 10x improvement in energy consumption over systems built today.