Chip designer Velaura AI announced on Tuesday that it has raised $110 million in a Series A funding round that valued the startup at more than $1 billion. According to reports from Reuters, the funding round was led by Seligman Ventures, with participation from new investors Capricorn Investment Group and Prosperity7 Ventures. Existing investors Mayfield, Maverick Silicon, MARA, Premji Invest, Samsung Catalyst Fund, and StepStone Group also participated in the round. The Santa Clara-based company announced that its core engineering and silicon technology remained intact during the rebrand, while adding new leadership including Manu Gulati as co-founder and chief development officer and Aditya Grover as founding advisor.
Velaura AI develops low-power chips and software technologies for data centers and physical AI applications, including robotics and autonomous systems. As reported by Reuters, the startup's technology focuses on lowering power consumption and operating costs at AI data centers. The company announced Titan Core, its proprietary chip design platform targeting greater efficiency and power savings in data center workloads earlier this year. Velaura claims its Titan Core proprietary digital chip IP and design platform can deliver a 2x to 4x improvement in performance per watt for mathematical operations used by AI accelerators without sacrificing performance. The company reports that the underlying technology has already been deployed across more than 30 million ASICs, providing evidence that its core engineering can move beyond laboratory demonstrations into commercial-scale manufacturing.
According to Reuters, Velaura AI is engaged with three of the four largest cloud computing providers, though the company declined to name them. The startup charges an upfront fee for its technology, plus a royalty tied to a share of the power savings customers achieve. CEO Rajiv Khemani confirmed this revenue structure is similar to Arm's per-chip licensing model before it started manufacturing its own chips. The company's leadership brings considerable semiconductor experience, with executives and engineers having backgrounds at Apple, NVIDIA, Google, Qualcomm, and Marvell. The company's business model focuses on enabling customers to achieve significant power savings while maintaining the same computing performance.
The $1 billion-plus valuation reflects investor expectations that energy efficiency will become a bigger piece of AI infrastructure economics, as the AI industry faces growing constraints from electricity availability. As reported by Reuters, hyperscalers are committing hundreds of billions of dollars to AI infrastructure, yet new data centers increasingly face constraints tied to grid connections, generation capacity, cooling, and the time required to bring new electrical infrastructure online. Velaura is targeting both ends of the emerging AI compute market: data centers where electricity consumption has become a major economic and infrastructure issue, and physical AI systems including robots, drones, and autonomous machines that must perform demanding AI workloads under tight energy and thermal limits. The company reports it is already working with leading hyperscalers to incorporate its technology into future XPU roadmaps, positioning itself for potential large-scale deployments as infrastructure costs climb.
