US-based AI chip startup Positron has secured a $23.5m in seed funding round to scale up production of AI chips.
This investment is aimed at bolstering the production of Positron’s US-manufactured, energy-efficient AI chips, which are said to provide a cost-effective alternative to Nvidia’s AI hardware solutions.
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The funding round saw participation from investors, including Flume Ventures, Valor Equity Partners, Atreides Management, and Resilience Reserve.
Flume Ventures Operating Partner Scott McNealy said: “Investing in domestic AI hardware is a strategic imperative when it comes to securing America’s global AI posture.
“Positron is proving that world-class AI compute doesn’t have to come from overseas, and we’re excited to support their mission to make the US a leader in AI hardware manufacturing.”
Positron said that its technology is already making its way to data centres and neoclouds across the country.
The company claimed that its Atlas systems currently deliver 3.5 times better performance per dollar and 3.5 times greater power efficiency than Nvidia’s H100 GPUs for inference.
Powered by FPGAs, the company’s servers support trillion-parameter models and are compatible with Hugging Face and OpenAI APIs.
By offering 70% faster inference at 66% lower power consumption compared to H100/H200 setups, Positron’s systems aim to reduce data centre CapEx by 50%, providing a scalable solution amid growing AI adoption, the firm noted.
Positron CEO Mitesh Agrawal said: “With this funding, we’re scaling at a pace that AI hardware has never seen before–from expanding shipments of our first-generation products to bringing our second generation accelerators to market in 2026.
“Our solution is growing rapidly because it outperforms conventional GPUs in both cost and energy efficiency, while delivering AI hardware that eliminates reliance on foreign supply chains.”
