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 investments from Synopsys and existing investors including Matrix Partners and Intel Capital reinvesting in the company.
The funding will support operational growth, accelerating the development and deployment of the company’s software-driven systems IP technology portfolio for system-on-chip (SoC) designs and the emerging chipset economy.
As intelligent computing continues to grow, its demands for AI capabilities, more efficient data movement, and computing density are driving the evolution of SoCs toward “system of chips” models. Using chipsets, this new approach delivers scalable performance, optimized power, and reduced costs without relying solely on traditional approaches, where progress is slow to come and is becoming increasingly costly.
Baya offers modular solutions designed to adapt to evolving needs and leverage these benefits for next-generation designs of AI, automotive and data center infrastructure, while meeting emerging standards such as the Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) die-to-die interconnect for further accelerated AI scaling.
“Generative AI and multimodal computing have clearly shown that the real challenge has shifted from compute engines to data movement and connectivity to truly meet the performance and efficiency needs of AI acceleration and scaling compute infrastructure and communications,” Andrew Homan, managing director at Maverick Silicon, said in a statement. “The Baya Systems team is uniquely positioned to fill this critical industry gap with its WeaverPro, WeaveIP and other solutions. »
To better support AI and other data- and compute-intensive applications, Baya provides a holistic approach to design, analyze and build complex, high-performance multi-chip systems that overcome the bottlenecks of semi- traditional drivers when it comes to data movement and scalability.
Baya’s WeaverPro foundational 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 ensure that the design meets the KPIs.
The WeaveIP comprehensive IP portfolio of advanced systems, with its unique transport, supports custom and standard protocols, maximizes performance and throughput while minimizing latency, silicon footprint and power, quickly delivering complex solutions.
“Baya Systems moved ahead of schedule to build the team, technology and products that meet its vision to solve the challenge of designing high-performance systems for the semiconductor industry,” said said Stan Reiss, general partner at Matrix Partners, in a statement. statement. “This revealed a much broader scope for the company and, in our view, this new capital injection is necessary to expand its leadership and capitalize on this opportunity.”
With a powerful team of entrepreneurial leaders and engineers from companies like Apple, AMD, Arm, Intel, Qualcomm and legendary microprocessor architect Jim Keller as president, Baya quickly emerged from stealth, brought its product to market flagship and is now positioned to increase its market share.
“Designing increasingly complex combinations of CPUs, GPUs, neural network accelerators and other processors is a brute force solution that the industry cannot rely on forever. It simply carries too much risk: high re-engineering costs, difficulty scaling, and potentially going to market with subpar metrics,” said Sailesh Kumar, founder and CEO of Baya Systems. “Baya’s performance-driven software approach, combined with our unique transport and modular structure intellectual property, is designed from the ground up to produce complex multi-die solutions that are correct by construction with a design process simplified.
Baya’s early customers and partners include Tenstorrent, which has licensed Baya technology for its AI and RISC-V chip solutions, as well as some partnerships that have not yet been announced, signaling the growing appeal and Baya’s global reach.
Baya Systems’ technology is chipset-ready, meaning it can be integrated into a system in which a set of chips sit on a silicon substrate in a solution that maximizes processing power, energy efficiency and network speed.
The company said it has grown in a focused and judicious manner. Nine months after its creation, Baya finalized the delivery of its first license and its product. Baya’s growth accelerated after emerging from stealth: the company secured numerous clients and partnerships.
The company has nearly 50 employees and its goal is to quadruple its reservations and turnover by the end of 2025.
When it comes to inspiration, Baya Systems began with the vision of enabling semiconductor system design to efficiently transition into the chipset era and meet the exponentially growing demands of intelligent computing (the tight integration of different computing elements such as CPUs, GPUs and accelerators that enable the various computing requirements of AI).
Origins
The co-founders – Sailesh Kumar, Eric Norige and Joji Philip – previously worked together at NetSpeed and then at Intel after its acquisition. At Intel, they focused particularly on the Xeon family of processors, creating an SoC builder and other tools to address the then-current challenges of scaling computing capabilities.
Baya Systems was incorporated in March 2023 and came out of stealth in June 2024. Baya is headquartered in Santa Clara, California.
Through their unique perspective, they recognized that communication bandwidth between compute, memory, and input/output (IO) was becoming a critical bottleneck for the advancement of AI and other functions of data-intensive computing, a bottleneck that existing system architectures could not effectively address.
The addition of Nandan Nayampally as CCO has enabled the company to think bigger. Nayampally’s experience at Arm helped lead the leadership of Arm’s iconic Cortex processor line beyond the traditional mobile, consumer and microcontroller worlds. But he also championed Arm’s consistent interconnect product lines, which now form the basis of data centers and automotive businesses. Like the founding team, he clearly saw the need for emerging AI to require specialized, high-performance solutions.
Modern architectures require massively parallel, high-bandwidth data movement and consistent, low-latency communication within large processor clusters. The Baya Systems team is committed to enabling transparent and effective communication within IT systems to unlock their full potential, the company said.
The company has a legendary chip design executive as president in Keller. He is a visionary technologist and shares the belief that the foundation of scale in the AI era is not just specialized computational elements, but also an overview of a given system and on the possibility of hyper-efficient data movement. The co-founders first met Jim while working concurrently at Intel. Keller has also played a central role in companies such as Apple, Tesla, AMD and various chip startups.
A phone call between Keller, Tanuja Rao and Kumar started it all. Keller shared his unwavering confidence in the unique skills of the core team, one of a kind capable of solving this enormous problem. In a short period of time, the company managed to secure investments, build a world-class team, acquire our first customer and deliver a unique and successful solution.
“[Keller’s] a strong sense of innovation and an understanding of market developments have been and will continue to be crucial to us as a business,” the company said.
As for competition, Arteris is currently the incumbent in SoC-on-chip fabrics, and companies like Arm and some EDA vendors have products that compete with parts of Baya’s portfolio.
However, Baya Systems is uniquely focused on creating a chiplet-ready framework that unifies transactions from different protocols over the same transport. Baya’s solutions complement Arm and EDA vendor offerings as well as existing EDA tool flows.
Some of the major semiconductor industry leaders have developed technologies similar to our Fabric platform in-house, but these technologies are tailored to their system architectures and are not produced for broader market use. Baya views these companies as potential partners and not competitors, as the Baya platform offers a more cost-effective and faster solution suitable for a number of custom or ASIC projects.
The company seeks to partner with organizations that share its philosophy of removing barriers to developing innovative, highly scalable and reliable SoC and chiplet systems. Current partners include Tenstorrent, Intel, Blue Cheetah, the Open Compute Project, and UCle (Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express), and the company actively contributes to and participates in their ecosystems.
In the same vein, Baya is also developing its own ecosystem with partners such as processor suppliers for CPU, GPU and NPU; EDA Companies; DHD and PHY providers; and foundries and design services companies, all of which can benefit from Baya’s portfolio.
