Vaire Computing raises $4.5 million for ‘reversible computing’ moonshot that could dramatically reduce energy needs

With the rise of AI, energy and heat efficiency have once again become pressing concerns for companies that use and build chips. The skyrocketing demand for hardware to run AI models is driving up power bills, as these servers require huge numbers of chips and massive cooling setups.

Variety Computingbased in London and Seattle, is betting on that reversible computing will be the way forward. It has now raised $4 million in a Seed round to work on building silicon chips that would consume negligible amounts of energy and generate little or no heat. The round was led by a deep tech fund 7 percent companies And Judas Gomila, the co-founder of Heyzap. The company had previously raised $500,000, so this round brings its total funding to $4.5 million.

In reversible computing, instead of performing a computation in only one direction (input followed by output) and then feeding the output into a new computation and reexecuting it, the computation can be performed in both directions (known as time-reversible computing). ). Effectively, the energy is retained in the chip instead of being released as heat. The theory is that this method would generate negligible amounts of heat, vastly reducing energy consumption. (A better explanation of its potential lies in this essay by Azeem Azhar and David Galbraith).

Vaire Computing was founded by serial entrepreneur Rodolfo Rosini and Hannah Earley, a researcher at the University of Cambridge who works on “unconventional computing” such as reversible and molecular computing.

During a phone conversation, Rosini told me: “Almost 100% of the energy in a chip is ultimately dissipated as heat. So you’re actually wasting it. But in a reversible chip you never actually lose this energy. You don’t allow the energy to become heat, and you recycle it internally. This means that two things happen: first, the chip doesn’t get hot, and second, you only need a small amount of energy to run it. So it uses almost no energy, apart from the same amount of energy it just recycled.”

The concept of reversible computing isn’t new, and there are many challenges before Vaire’s chips can become a reality, but Rosini thinks the shift to this new approach to computing won’t be much different from the way we switched from light bulbs. to LEDs. “The similarity is between an old incandescent-based light bulb and LEDs,” he said. “LEDs are colder and more efficient, and there is a cluster of… This is almost identical to reversible computing. You don’t have a single core that is super fast, you have many smaller cores and they are all super efficient.”

He says a major advantage of chips that can perform reversible computing is that they can be used in generic applications, just as normal CPUs are used today. “Other types of chips are domain specific, but with computing you can do anything… We could also build a CPU or a GPU, and it would look like any other chip.”

When asked why funding in the space is so low if the technology is as revolutionary as it sounds, Rosini said: “Because the amount of money put into reversible computing and alternative chip architecture is almost nothing,” he said, pointing out the billions spent on quantum computers, photonics and GPUs.

“If you go outside these well-trodden areas and talk about building a completely new architecture, there is absolutely no one who wants to finance that. Second, we don’t really need a lot of money to make the first chip and prove the technology. Once we prove that, we’ll need a much larger round to actually build a chip, he added.

For her part, Earley believes that reversible computing can be used to create the most powerful computers. “I got involved in this field during my PhD in 2016,” she says. “Coincidentally, my supervisor sent me the dissertation of my friend who was in the group at the University of Florida that was researching reversible computing. I was interested in how I could apply it to my research field at the time, namely molecular programming. I started thinking that reversible computing is interesting in itself, especially because it could enable the most powerful form of computing possible. After completing my PhD, I met Rudolfo and we realized that we had the same vision.”

“Vaire Computing is different because its technology is innovative at a fundamental level, making the company extremely well positioned to capture a large share of the future AI chip and ultimately computer processor market,” said Andrew J Scott, founder of 7percent Ventures. in a statement.

Also joining the round were Seedcamp, Clim8, Tom Knight (an inventor of modern reversible computing), and Jared Kopf, founder of Ramble.ai.

In addition, Vaire has hired Mike Frank, a well-known researcher in the field of reversible computing, as the company’s senior scientist.

Vaire recently became one of only ten companies named in the second UK cohort of Intel Ignite, Intel’s global startup accelerator program for early-stage deep tech startups.