Samsung Ventures invests in Israeli AI systems and semiconductor company NeuReality

NeuReality, an Israeli AI systems and semiconductor company, announced that Samsung Ventures has made an investment in the company. NeuReality makes inference technologies, such as computer vision, natural language processing, and recommendation engines easier to implement for a broader set of less technical companies.

More than just a chip company, NeuReality’s comprehensive solution includes hardware, software and tools that work together to simplify and accelerate AI deployment. The company currently employs more than 30 employees and plans to double its size and recruit talent in VLSI chip design, AI, software, and hardware.

Ori Kirshner, head of Samsung Ventures in Israel, stated: “We see substantial and immediate need for higher efficiency and easy-to-deploy inference solutions for data centers and on-premises use cases, and this is why we are investing in NeuReality. The company’s innovative disaggregation, data movement and processing technologies improve computation flows, compute-storage flows, and in-storage compute – all of which are critical for the ability to adopt and grow AI solutions. Samsung Ventures is committed to invest in companies with strong synergy to Samsung’s core business and NeuReality fits well into this commitment.”

The adoption and growth of AI solutions face various obstacles, which prevent retail, manufacturing, healthcare, and other sectors from deploying AI inference capabilities into business workflows. While the company is new, NeuReality’s team draws from decades of experience in AI, data center systems, hardware design, and software development. As a result, NeuReality uses a system level approach that combines easy-to-use software with high efficiency deep learning and data handling acceleration hardware. This holistic approach dramatically simplifies and accelerates the adoption and mass deployment of inference technology.

Focusing on the growth of real-life AI applications, NeuReality’s solutions are purpose built for a wide variety of sectors including public safety, e-commerce, social networks, medical and healthcare, digital personal assistants, and more. NR1 solution targets cloud and enterprise datacenters, alongside carriers, telecom operators and other near edge compute solutions.

NeuReality emerged out of stealth last year with $8 million seed funding from Cardumen Capital, OurCrowd and Varana Capital. In November 2021, NeuReality signed an agreement with IBM to develop the next generation of high-performance AI inference platforms that will deliver disruptive cost and power consumption improvements for deep learning use cases. NeuReality is also collaborating with AMD to deliver its first-generation AI-centric FPGA based platforms for Inference acceleration to customers.

NeuReality is creating purpose-built AI-platforms for ultra-scalability of real-life AI applications and positioned itself as a pioneer in the deep learning and AI solutions market. The company’s NR1 is the company’s next generation integrated circuit device that is based on its AI-centric architecture. The SoC improves the utilization of AI compute resources that are currently deployed by removing the existing system bottlenecks, lowering the latency of AI operations and saving in overall system cost and power consumption. The company also develops complementary software tools and runtime libraries that make it easy for customers in various skill levels and various deployment topologies to adopt new AI based services in their business workflows

Moshe Tanach, CEO and co-founder of NeuReality, stated: “The investment from Samsung Ventures is a big vote of confidence in NeuReality’s technology. The funds will help us take the company to the next level and take our NR1 SoC to production. This will enable our customers to evolve their system architecture, and this evolution will make it easier for them to scale and maintain their AI infrastructure, whether it is in their data center, in a cloud or on-premises.”

NeuReality was founded in 2019 and is led by a seasoned management team with extensive experience in AI, data-center architecture, system, and software. NeuReality was co-founded by CEO Moshe Tanach, formerly Director of Engineering at Marvell and Intel and AVP R&D at DesignArt-Networks (later acquired by Qualcomm); VP Operations Tzvika Shmueli, formerly VP of Backend at Mellanox Technologies and VP of Engineering at Habana Labs; and VP VLSI Yossi Kasus, formerly Senior Director of Engineering at Mellanox and the head of VLSI at EZChip. The company’s leading team also includes CTO Lior Khermosh, former co-founder and Chief Scientist of ParallelM and a fellow at PMC Sierra.

NeuReality team. Photo credit – Yossi Zeliger