Business Wire

ANARI-AI

20.4.2021 14:01:13 CEST | Business Wire | Press release

Share
Anari AI Raises $2M to Rebuild the AI Hardware Industry Through Personalized Cloud Chips

Anari AI , an AI chip factory in the cloud, today announced it has raised $2 million in seed funding led by Earlybird , with participation from Acequia Capital , Serbian Entrepreneurs , and Eric Ries , author and founder of The Lean Startup . The new funding will be used to continue developing the platform and bring it to market.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210420005700/en/

Anari’s platform makes it possible to design personalized AI chips in the cloud with just one click. With this approach, companies are able to build and deploy AI solutions in weeks instead of 12-18 months, and at a fraction of the cost of traditional hardware development.

“AI continues to be growing in size and complexity, and this rate of growth is outpacing standard CPU and GPU performance gains,” said Roland Manger , co-founder and Partner at Earlybird. “Dedicated designs or flexible architectures are expensive, time-consuming and require hardware skills (in short: take lots of effort). Anari is a game changer in two ways: it removes the trade-off between performance and effort, and it makes AI-problem-specific chip solutions available instantaneously in the cloud. I am excited about this huge potential.”

The platform is built on a unique Python-based programming framework—developed by Anari for chip design—that opens up new possibilities for hardware engineers and turns software engineers into hardware designers. The first configurable AI cloud chip from Anari is Thor X, which delivers 100x more efficient processing of 3D Point Cloud/Graph data structures compared to a high-end GPU.

Anari’s team consists of Ph.D. researchers, machine learning experts, and senior software engineers. The team is led by Jovan Stojanovic (co-founder and CEO), Stefan Sredojevic (co-founder and COO), and Bogdan Vukobratovic (co-founder and Head of R&D). Jovan is the founder of the Wonderland AI community that includes more than 30,000 AI experts and enthusiasts from all over the world. The yearly Wonderland AI Summit gathers C-level speakers and attendees from the world’s leading AI companies like NVIDIA, Airbus, HP, IBM, Mercedes, etc.

“You no longer have to tune your model to the computing infrastructure that’s available and designed for broad and generic use cases,” said Sasha Ostojic , ex-VP at NVIDIA, ex-SVP at Cruise Automation, Advisor at Samsung Electronics and Zoox, and Operating Partner at Playground Global.“ Anari's cloud chip technology is the future of cloud computing.”

Roland Manger and Sasha Ostojic will be joining Anari's Board of Directors. Advisors to the company include Christoph Auer-Welsbach (former Partner at IBM Ventures, Founder of CITY AI, and CEO of Kaizo) and Dejan Markovic (co-founder of Flex Logix and Professor at UCLA).

“With AI model complexity doubling every three and a half months, the current way of building the AI infrastructure is not sustainable,” said Jovan Stojanovic, co-founder and CEO of Anari AI. “We believe that every company deserves to have a personalized chip for their AI in just one click. We’re supporting the rapid progress of AI in ways that haven’t been possible until now. With experienced investors like Earlybird on our side, we’re ready to rebuild the AI hardware industry from scratch.”

About Anari AI

Anari AI is rebuilding the AI hardware industry from scratch by delivering a new way of designing and using AI chips through programming in the cloud. The Anari platform for cloud chips can be used by companies across industries such as gaming, automotive and biotechnology to personalize their AI infrastructure with just one click. The company is based in Serbia and has an office in San Francisco. The global team includes advisors with experience from NVIDIA, CERN, IBM, UC Berkeley, and UCLA.

For more information, visit www.anari.ai .

About Earlybird VC

Earlybird is a venture capital investor focused on European technology companies. Founded in 1997, Earlybird invests in all growth and development phases of a company. Amongst the most experienced venture investors in Europe, Earlybird offers its portfolio companies not only financial resources, but also strategic and operational support as well as access to an international network and capital markets.

Earlybird Venture Capital has grown to three autonomous, dedicated and specialized teams, focusing on digital technologies in Eastern and Western Europe as well as health technologies. Among them, the Digital East Fund is focused on early stage ICT investment opportunities in Eastern Europe and Turkey, being the leading tech VC in this region. With EUR 1.5 billion under management, seven IPOs and 30 trade sales, Earlybird is one of the most successful venture capital firms in Europe. Discover more at www.earlybird.com .

Link:

ClickThru

Social Media:

https://www.facebook.com/anariaicompany/

About Business Wire

Business Wire
Business Wire
101 California Street, 20th Floor
CA 94111 San Francisco

http://businesswire.com

Subscribe to releases from Business Wire

Subscribe to all the latest releases from Business Wire by registering your e-mail address below. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Latest releases from Business Wire

Altrove and Bloomineral Named Winners of the 2026 Grand Prix ACF AutoTech22.4.2026 15:21:00 CEST | Press release

IoT.Bzh receives the inaugural Industrialization Prize at the 9th edition of the international automotive startup competition Altrove and Bloomineral have been crowned winners of the 2026 Grand Prix ACF AutoTech, the international startup competition recognizing the best of automotive innovation. The ninth edition was held on Wednesday, April 15 at the Automobile Club de France in Paris, where IoT.Bzh also received the first-ever Industrialization Prize. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260422236542/en/ Picture of the end of the event with the winners : Bloomineral, Altrove and Iot.Bzh + all the Jury Members from French Automotive OEM and Tier1 Hosted by competition founder Richard de Cabrol and Simon Degiovanni, the evening gathered more than 250 leaders from the automotive, technology, digital, business and media sectors, with attendees joining both on-site and online. Six finalist startups, selected from mor

I/ONX Shatters the Host Tax: New Symphony SixtyFour Architecture Delivers 50% TCO Savings Across AI Inference and Fine-Tuning Lifecycle22.4.2026 15:00:00 CEST | Press release

Eliminating infrastructure overhead of legacy designs, I/ONX debuts a scaled AI inference and fine-tuning stack that cuts power by up to 30kW per rack and reduces cost of rack-scale deployments by up to 70% I/ONX High Performance Compute (HPC), a leading provider of heterogeneous AI systems, today announced the global launch of the Symphony SixtyFour, a high-density platform designed to collapse the physical and economic footprint of AI inference and fine-tuning infrastructure. By supporting up to 64 accelerators on a single node, I/ONX eliminates the redundant Host Tax—the massive overhead in power, hardware, and licensing that negatively impacts ROI in enterprise AI. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260422485327/en/ I/ONX Introduces Symphony SixtyFour: The Host Tax is Over. Save 30-50% on your AI Infrastructure Costs. While inference now accounts for 90% of enterprise AI workloads, enterprises are entirely li

Thales Introduces Imperva for Google Cloud, Bringing Its Enterprise-Grade Application Security Capabilities Directly into Google Cloud22.4.2026 15:00:00 CEST | Press release

New offering eliminates the need to choose between cloud-native performance and advanced security as enterprises scale modern applications Thales today announced the Controlled Availability of Imperva for Google Cloud, bringing the industry's most trusted application security platform directly into Google Cloud. Designed to operate within Google Cloud, the new offering enables organizations to protect web applications and APIs by leveraging Google Cloud’s Service Extension traffic, preserving existing pipelines, integrations, and monitoring workflows. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260422746638/en/ ©Thales As enterprises accelerate cloud adoption, development teams increasingly standardize on native cloud services to improve speed and reduce operational complexity. Many security solutions, however, require external routing that introduces latency and friction. At the same time, native cloud security tools oft

ClickHouse Expands Strategic Collaboration with Google Cloud, Bringing Deeper Integration, Cloud Flexibility, and Next-Generation Performance22.4.2026 15:00:00 CEST | Press release

ClickHouse, a leader in real-time analytics, data warehousing, observability, and AI/ML, today at Google Next 26 announced a significant expansion of its strategic collaboration with Google Cloud. The announcement encompasses four major milestones: native integration with Google Cloud Lakehouse, the availability of ClickHouse's Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC), the migration of ClickHouse Cloud on Google Cloud to Google's custom Arm-based Axion processors, and a new integration between the ClickHouse MCP server and Google Antigravity. These advancements deliver deeper interoperability across the data ecosystem, extend deployment flexibility for security-conscious enterprises, and unlock meaningful gains in query performance and cost efficiency for joint customers worldwide. This expansion builds on ClickHouse's growing presence within the Google Cloud ecosystem, where thousands of data-intensive organizations rely on ClickHouse Cloud to power real-time observability, business intelligence,

GigaDevice GD32F5HC Series MCU Grand Launch, Advancing High‑Performance Innovation for HMI and IoT Edge Solutions22.4.2026 15:00:00 CEST | Press release

GigaDevice, a leading global supplier of semiconductor devices, today announced the official launch of the GD32F5HC series 32‑bit general‑purpose microcontrollers. Designed with compact size, high frequency operation, large memory, and strong security, while also offering ultra‑low power consumption and rich peripheral configuration, the new series expands the GD32 Arm® Cortex®‑M33 portfolio and delivers a powerful platform for next‑generation HMI and IoT Edge solutions. Samples, development boards, and full technical documentation are now available to support rapid evaluation and mass‑production deployment. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260422790734/en/ GigaDevice GD32F5HC Series MCU for HMI and IoT Edge Solutions High‑Efficiency, Advanced Compute Performance and Integrated Security Delivering a Powerful Competitive Edge. The GD32F5HC series, built on the Arm® Cortex®‑M33 core, operates at a main frequency

In our pressroom you can read all our latest releases, find our press contacts, images, documents and other relevant information about us.

Visit our pressroom
World GlobeA line styled icon from Orion Icon Library.HiddenA line styled icon from Orion Icon Library.Eye