Chip designer Velaura AI valued at more than $1 billion after funding round

Aug. 18 (Reuters) - Velaura AI was valued at more than $1 billion on Tuesday after raising $110 million in a Series A funding round, with investors backing the startup's chip design technology for lowering power consumption and operating costs at AI data centers.

The funding round was led by Seligman Ventures, with participation from new investor Capricorn Investment Group. Existing investors Samsung Catalyst Fund, StepStone Group and Maverick Silicon also participated.

Here are some details:

• Velaura AI develops low-power chips and software technologies for data centers and so-called physical AI applications, including robotics and autonomous systems.
• The startup said the funds will be used to speed up development and deployment of its AI products and hire more engineers and customer-facing staff.
• Earlier this year, Velaura announced Titan Core, its proprietary chip design platform targeting greater efficiency and power savings in data center workloads.
• “The next era of AI will be defined not only by better models, but also by fundamentally better compute economics," Rajiv Khemani, co-founder and CEO of Velaura AI, said in a statement.