I'm investing in Tensil
Tensil is a YC-backed company building a framework that enables developers to easily create hardware accelerators for their applications. They are now raising their Seed round.
Hi everyone,
I hope you are all doing OK with the current downturn. I personally think it’s a good thing, as we will finally have time to breathe and build!
Today I would like to introduce a new company I’m investing in, Tensil, which is a framework that enables developers to easily create custom hardware accelerators, without having to learn hardware design.
One of my core investment thesis for the coming years is that we will need hardware acceleration everywhere, as applications are transitioning from being logic heavy to being data heavy (which general-purpose CPUs are not designed to handle well). Add to this the global semiconductor shortage and the end of Moore’s law, and you have an explosive cocktail of fundamentals driving this hardware renaissance.
Some example of accelerators include GPUs and TPUs used in AI, to Bitcoin mining ASICs, GPS chips, ZK and FHE accelerators, quantum computers and many more. The Apple M1 for example has a central CPU surrounded by dozens of special-purpose accelerators, enabling the incredible power/performance ratio we are now seeing on common smartphones.
The problem however is that it takes an entire team and millions of dollars to design even a simple hardware accelerator, due to the high complexity of having to deal with atoms and such. And this is precisely the problem Tensil is solving, by enabling developers to create custom accelerators using a lego type or approach: just mix and match existing blocks, configure them and you can get up to 1000x better performance than on a GPU!
The company went to YCombinator a couple years ago, but recently pivoted to this vision. They already released an open source version of their framework, focusing on FPGA acceleration of AI models.
They are now raising a 3M seed round, giving them 24 months of runway to grow their developer community and start validating their business model. The full deck is here.
Let me know if you would like to participate and I can introduce you to the founders or share some of my allocation.
Cheers,
Rand
Disclaimer: not financial advice, do your own research, etc..
I'm investing in Tensil
Thanks Rand!
I'm interested, how I can find more details about deal terms ?
Best regards,
Cristian