We’ve been appointed to drive a long-term sales programme in Japan for Rain AI – a pioneer of cutting-edge artificial intelligence chips.
San Francisco-based Rain AI is building the world’s most energy-efficient semiconductor accelerator solutions for AI inference and training. It uses novel compute-in-memory (CIM) technology, RISC-V processing cores and specialised machine learning model optimisation tools.
With chips able to run the most powerful AI models, Rain AI’s technology can operate on a wide range of devices from robots to drones, cars, smartphones, VR headsets and ‘wearables’.
The company made a splash in 2018 when it secured seed funding from AI pioneer Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT developer OpenAI, who has also pledged $51 million to buy chips from the company. Rain AI since raised $25 million Series A financing in 2022, plus more funding over the past year.
As Rain AI expands overseas, one of its primary interests is targeting Japan’s rapidly growing semiconductor and electronics ecosystem, tapping into opportunities across fields including consumer devices, mobility and robotics.
Our initial focus in Japan will be on licensing Rain AI’s IP to fast-growing chip designers.
There’s also an immediate opportunity for the company to co-design accelerator solutions with Japanese corporations developing on-device AI applications for consumer electronics, as well as with large tech and defence industry players. This will give those corporations an advantage by using the best possible AI hardware.
Rain AI’s accelerator chips will be ready from early next year, so our brief will expand at that point to secure sales of those as well.
William Passo, CEO at Rain AI (pictured), said: “Customer demand for our solutions is surging quickly and it was a natural choice to look to Japan as one of our first international markets, given its strengths in the electronic and semiconductor sectors.
“Running the most advanced models in any form factor is the future of AI, and we’re now one step closer to doing this in the Japanese market with Intralink. We’re looking forward to working closely together to achieve great things in Japan!”
To discuss the prospects for your tech business in Japan, contact Tommy Shiekman at thomas.shiekman@intralinkgroup.com