Samsung invests in NeuReality, an ML chip startup focused on inference acceleration.

Samsung Ventures has invested an undisclosed amount in NeuReality, an Israeli inference chip designer, marking the company's second major funding round. NeuReality previously secured $8 million in seed funding last year. Founded in 2018, the company is developing silicon and software solutions aimed at improving inference efficiency in datacenters and on-premises deployments.

NeuReality's core technology centers on what it calls a hardware-based "AI hypervisor"—a system-on-chip design that routes inference requests from the network to acceleration engines with minimal intervention by a host CPU processor. The company believes this approach will capture higher efficiencies than rival datacenter inference accelerators. According to Ori Kirshner, head of Samsung Ventures in Israel, "We see substantial and immediate need for higher efficiency and easy-to-deploy inference solutions for datacenters and on-premises use cases, and this is why we are investing in NeuReality." Kirshner further noted that NeuReality's "disaggregation, data movement and processing technologies improve computation flows, compute-storage flows, and in-storage compute – all of which are critical for the ability to adopt and grow AI solutions."

While NeuReality has not yet taped out its first SoC design, the NR1, the company operates a prototype system consisting of 16 Xilinx Versal FPGA cards, now part of AMD's AI-centric product portfolio. Like Nvidia and other major AI chip designers, NeuReality is bundling custom-made software and tools with its silicon to simplify inference application deployment.

The startup's team brings substantial semiconductor and networking credentials. Founding CEO Moshe Tanach previously served as director of engineering at Marvell Technology and Intel, and helped design 4G base station products at a company later acquired by Qualcomm. Co-founders Tzvika Shmueli and Yossi Kasus both came from Mellanox Technologies, which Nvidia acquired in 2020. Tanach stated, "The investment from Samsung Ventures is a big vote of confidence in NeuReality's technology. The funds will help us take the company to the next level and take our NR1 SoC to production."

Samsung Ventures' backing reflects broader datacenter ambitions. The venture arm is pursuing a $356 billion initiative to invest in chip design and production, biotech, and AI by 2026.