RAIN AI Investment Press Release
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
OneSixOne Ventures Invests $950,000 in Rain AI's Series A Extension Round
Gainesville, FL - February 12, 2024 - OneSixOne Ventures, a Gainesville-based venture capital firm, has invested $950,000 into Rain AI. This was part of Rain AI’s $8m Series A extension round and marks the largest investment to date for OneSixOne Ventures. Rain AI is an AI chip startup founded by University of Florida alumni Jack Kendall and Gordon Wilson, as well as UF researcher Dr. Juan Claudio Nino, with a mission to dramatically improve the efficiency of compute systems and substantially reduce the cost of compute. This is one of the largest points of friction holding AI innovation back today and Rain AI has demonstrated through experiments and modeling that their in-memory compute patented technology could be the solution.
Rain AI is building the world’s most cost and energy efficient hardware for AI. Their products achieve an order of magnitude improvement over the status quo by co-designing every layer of the AI stack.
William Passo, CEO of Rain AI, expressed enthusiasm to be partnering with OneSixOne Ventures and stated “The AI problem is an energy problem. Creating a future with abundant and scalable artificial intelligence is critical for the AI revolution. We’ve never seen more demand for our hardware than we do now, and I’m excited for what’s to come in 2024 and beyond.”
The company's applications span across multiple industries, including drones, VR goggles, autonomous vehicles, smartphones, robotics, and wearables. With seven patents awarded for proprietary chip architecture and algorithms, Rain AI has begun commercializing their intellectual property in 2024. The company plans to launch its first chip ready for customers in 2025 and they are already in discussions with customers across the spectrum.
Pablo Casilimas, Managing Partner at OneSixOne Ventures, expressed enthusiasm for the investment "Rain AI's strong applications for both defense and enterprise use cases align perfectly with our firm’s focus on investing early into transformative dual-use technology startups. We are excited to support their journey towards developing AI infrastructure that is cost-effective, energy efficient and scalable."
Justis Mendez, Managing Partner at OneSixOne Ventures, added, "The origin story of Rain AI being founded at UF is direct proof of our original thesis, that the smartest and brightest are coming out of UF. We have known Jack since 2015 and always knew he was going to change the world with his technology. Now with the Florida Semiconductor Institute, the HiPerGator from Nvidia, and the donation of Malachowsky Hall focused around Data Science and AI, UF is positioned to become our nation’s powerhouse for AI startups."
Jack Kendall, Co-founder and CTO of Rain AI, shared his excitement about the partnership with OneSixOne Ventures, saying, “UF will always be my home, and I'm glad that OneSixOne can join Rain on our journey to make AI compute more efficient and accessible. AI and semiconductor innovation is incredibly important, not just for UF, but for the US broadly. I believe Rain's chips can power this next wave of innovation.”
Rain AI was founded in 2017 and quickly gained recognition after being accepted into Y-Combinator in 2018. The company secured a $5 million seed round led by Sam Altman, co-founder of OpenAI, and subsequently relocated to Silicon Valley to further its research and development efforts. In 2022, Rain AI raised a $25 million Series A round led by Sam Altman once again, as reported by Reuters.
Notable milestones include a letter of intent from OpenAI to purchase $51 million worth of AI chips from Rain AI, showcasing the industry's confidence in the company's innovative solutions. Based on Rain's IP and future roadmap, the company’s proprietary tech will ultimately lead to a 10,000x improvement in efficiency over GPUs on the market today.
Rain AI has now raised over $40m from notable investors including Sam Altman, co-founder/CEO of OpenAI, which created ChatGPT; Jeff Rothschild, a founding engineer at Facebook; Daniel Gross, co-founder of AI startup Cue (acquired by Apple); Oliver Cameron, Founder of autonomous vehicle startup Voyage (Acquired by Cruise); Jaan Tallinn, founding engineer at Skype; and Scott Gray, an AI hardware expert and early member of OpenAI’s technical team. Rain AI has also assembled a strong advisory board which includes Dr. Jackson Hu, the former CEO & Chairman of UMC, the 2nd largest semiconductor manufacturer in the world; and Dr. Arijit Raychowdhury, a leading expert of in-memory compute and Chair of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Georgia Tech university.
Rain AI is well-positioned to disrupt the semiconductor market, projected to surpass $1.3 trillion by 2032.
For media inquiries or further information, please contact:
Pablo Casilimas
Managing Partner
OneSixOne Ventures
pablo@onesixonegroup.com
9548494130
