On the Edge of the Possible: Why We Invested in SEMRON
We’re excited to share more about our Seed investment in SEMRON, the Dresden-based company developing revolutionary semiconductors that enable AI to run directly on your smartphone.
Consider a not-so-distant future in which your smartwatch preemptively notifies you of any irregularities in your life, and lets you manage tasks with unprecedented efficiency. This vision of pervasive on-device intelligence — powered by on-edge computing — is closer to reality than many would anticipate. This is, in large part, thanks to advancements in AI chip technology.
This future reliant on locally-run AI seems even more likely now that Apple recently cancelled its (never officially announced) “Apple Car” allegedly to focus more on AI projects, and Samsung announced their latest AI-powered flagship phone.
Enter Dresden-based SEMRON. By developing chips specifically designed to perform AI tasks through the highest level of intelligence density, SEMRON is blazing through the market’s current challenges — namely performance density, cost-effectiveness, and energy efficiency. While companies like Microsoft have the necessary resources to purchase staggering amounts of AI chips to build and run cloud-based AI infrastructure on edge devices, the ability to run them more efficiently will be an obvious success factor for players in the AI space. We’ve identified SEMRON as a clear leader here.
Why we invested in SEMRON
Technology and hardware. SEMRON’s unique 3D-scaled AI chip, which capitalizes on in-memory analog computing, signifies a considerable leap forward. Its CapRAM© technology addresses the heating and manufacturing challenges of current hardware, offering a solution that’s not only robust in performance density but also dramatically more cost-effective and energy-efficient.
Scalability and efficiency. By utilising memcapacitors, SEMRON crafts chips that perform calculations through electrical fields — not currents. This minimizes electron movement, significantly lowering power consumption and heat generation. In short: SEMRON’s chips can host hundreds of layers of memcapacitors on a single chip — massively increasing compute capacity and doing so with a cost-effective method compatible with existing semiconductor manufacturing processes. Thereby, SEMRON enables the deployment of several hundred times the compute resources on a fixed silicon area.
Team. At the heart of SEMRON’s drive lies the vision of its founders, Aron and Kai-Uwe. They are working toward a future where their technology, first patented in 2016, enables devices as commonplace as smartphones to become powerhouses of AI computation, delivering capabilities that, until now, have only been possible through specialized data centers. Their initial focus on edge computing also prevents them from having to directly compete with leading AI titans like NVIDIA.
Our decision to invest in SEMRON is rooted in our confidence in the company’s potential to lead a significant shift in AI computing. Thanks to their pioneering CapRAM technology, SEMRON’s chips enable even the most advanced AI models to operate efficiently on consumer devices. This capability marks a significant leap toward realizing accessible and widespread AI. SEMRON is one of the companies not only participating in the AI revolution but actively driving it forward. We are certain that this is only the first of many times that you will hear about SEMRON.
We are proud to lead SEMRON’s € 7.3m Seed round alongside SquareOne, OTB Ventures, and Hermann Hauser as well as Pre-Seed investors such as Hans Rohrer, former President at TSMC Europe, Dr. Wolfram Drescher (BlueWonder), and Andreas Werner and Sven Sieber (Gigahertz Ventures).
Want to know more? Drop us a line at hello@join.capital.
