Baya Systemsa chip technology company that wants to accelerate intelligent computing, has raised $36 million in funding.

Maverick Silicon led the round, which also included strategic investment from Synopsys and existing investors including Matrix Partners and Intel Capital who reinvested in the company.

The funding will support operational improvement, accelerate the development and deployment of the company’s software-driven systems IP technology portfolio for system-on-chip (SoC) designs and the emerging economy of chiplet.

As intelligent computing continues to grow, its demands for AI capabilities, more efficient data movement and computational density are driving the evolution of SoCs into “system-of-chips” models. By using chiplets, this new method offers scalable performance, optimized power and reduced costs without relying on traditional methods, where further progress is slow in coming and becoming more expensive.

Baya provides modular solutions designed to adapt to changing needs and take advantage of these benefits for next-generation designs for AI, automotive and data center infrastructure—while also following trends – advanced standards such as Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) die-to-die interconnect for further accelerated AI scaling.

“Generative AI and multimodal compute clearly show that the real challenge has shifted from computing engines to moving data and connectivity to truly deliver the performance and efficiency demands of AI acceleration and scale compute that infrastructure and communications,” said Andrew Homan, managing director of Maverick Silicon, in a statement. “The Baya Systems team is uniquely positioned to fill this critical gap in the industry with WeaverPro, WeaveIP and its other solutions.”

To better support AI and other compute-heavy and data-intensive applications, Baya offers a holistic approach to design, analyze and build complex, highly efficient multi-die systems that can overcome in traditional semiconductors bottlenecks in data movement and scalability.

Baya’s foundational WeaverPro software enables continuous refinement of data-driven architecture and micro-architecture development from initial specification through post-silicon tuning, with built-in simulation and workload analysis that ensures design can provide KPIs.

The comprehensive WeaveIP advanced system IP portfolio, with unique transport, supports custom and standard protocols, maximizes performance and throughput while reducing latency, silicon footprint and power, rapidly delivering complex solutions.

“Baya Systems is ahead of schedule in building the team, the technology and the products that deliver its vision to solve the high-performance system design challenge for the semiconductor industry,” said Stan Reiss, general partner of Matrix Partners, in a statement. “This uncovers an even greater scope for the company, and in our view, this new infusion of capital is necessary to expand leadership and capitalize on that opportunity.”

With a high-powered team of entrepreneurial leaders and engineers from companies such as Apple, AMD, Arm, Intel, Qualcomm, and legendary microprocessor architect Jim Keller as chairman, Baya quickly emerged from hiding, has delivered its flagship product to the market and is now positioned to increase its market share.

“Designing highly complex combinations of CPUs, GPUs, neural network accelerators and other processors is a brute-force solution that the industry cannot rely on forever. It just comes with a lot of risks: high cost of re-engineering, difficulty in scaling and potentially hitting the market with sub-par metrics,” said Sailesh Kumar, founder and CEO, Baya Systems. “Baya’s performance-focused, software-based approach, combined with our unique transportation and modular IP fabric, was designed from the ground up to create complex multi-die solutions right by building with a simplified design process.”

Baya’s early customers and partners include Tenstorrent, which has licensed Baya’s technology for AI and RISC-V chiplet solutions, and several unannounced partnerships, marking the growing Baya’s traction and reach around the world.

Baya Systems’ technology is chiplet-ready, meaning it can be a system where a set of chips sits on top of a silicon substrate in a solution that maximizes processing power, energy efficiency and network speed.

The company says it is growing in a targeted, smart way. Nine months after inception, Baya completed the first license and product delivery. The development of Baya was accelerated after it came out of hiding: the company acquired many customers and partnerships.

The company has around 50 employees, and its goal is to quadruple bookings and revenue by the end of 2025.

As for inspiration, Baya Systems started with a vision to enable semiconductor system design to efficiently transition to the chiplet era and match the rapidly increasing needs of intelligent computing (the tight integration of various computing elements such as CPUs, GPUs and accelerators that can handle the various computational needs of AI).

Origins

The cofounders – Sailesh Kumar, Eric Norige and Joji Philip – previously worked together at NetSpeed ​​​​and later at Intel after its acquisition. At Intel, they are particularly focused on the Xeon family of processors, creating an SoC builder and other tools to meet the current challenges of scaling computational capabilities.

Baya Systems was incorporated in March 2023 and went public in June 2024. Baya is located in Santa Clara, California.

With their unique perspective, they recognize that communication bandwidth between compute, memory, and input/output (IO) has become a critical bottleneck in the development of AI and other data-intensive compute functions, a which the current system architecture cannot effectively address.

The addition of Nandan Nayampally as our CCO allows the company to think bigger. Nayampally’s background at Arm has been involved in helping to drive the leadership of Arm’s iconic Cortex CPU product line beyond the traditional mobile phone, consumer, and microcontroller worlds. But he also pioneered Arm’s interconnect product lines, which are now the foundation for the data center and automotive businesses. Like the founding team, he clearly sees the need for emerging AI scale that requires specialized high performance solutions.

Modern architectures require massively parallel and high-bandwidth data movement, as well as low-latency parallel communication within large CPU clusters. The Baya Systems team is determined to enable seamless and efficient communication within computing systems to unlock their full potential, the company said.

The company has a legendary chip design executive as its chairman in Keller. He is a technologist with a vision, and he shares the belief that the foundation of the scale for the AI ​​era is not only about special elements of calculation, but also taking a big picture view of even which provides a system and enables the movement of hyper-efficient data. The cofounders originally met Jim during their overlapping time at Intel. Keller has also played key roles at companies such as Apple, Tesla, AMD and various chip startups.

A phone call between Keller, Tanuja Rao and Kumar set everything in motion. Keller shares his unwavering belief in the unique skills of the core team that are uniquely capable of solving this massive problem. Within a short period of time, the company was able to secure investment, build a world-class team, acquire our first customer, and deliver a high-performance and unique solution.

“(Keller’s) keen eye for innovation and understanding of market developments has been and will continue to be important to us as a company,” the company said.

As for the competition, Arteris is the current incumbent in the pure-play on-chip SoC fabric arena, and companies like Arm and several EDA vendors have products that compete with parts of Baya’s portfolio.

However, Baya Systems has a unique focus on creating a chiplet-ready fabric from the ground up that integrates transactions from different protocols into the same transport. Baya solutions complement Arm and EDA vendor offerings as well as existing EDA tool flows.

Some of the major semiconductor leaders have built technologies in-house similar to our fabric platform, but these technologies are tailored to their system architectures and not manufactured for wider market use. Baya sees these companies as potential partners, not competitors, because the Baya platform offers a more cost-effective, faster time-to-market solution suitable for many customers. or ASIC projects.

The company seeks to collaborate with organizations that share the philosophy of breaking down barriers to the development of innovative, highly scalable and reliable SoC and chiplet systems. Current partners include Tenstorrent, Intel, Blue Cheetah, Open Compute Project and UCle (Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express), and the company actively contributes and participates in their ecosystem.

In the same vein, Baya is also growing its own ecosystem with partners such as processor vendors for CPUs, GPUs and NPUs; EDA companies; DHD and PHY vendors; and foundries and design service houses, all of which will benefit Baya’s portfolio.