Retym, a chip startup focused on solving some of the troubling challenges within AI data centers, has been born out of stealth, with more than $180 million raised in multiple funding rounds. The company, which has been operating quietly for the past four years, is set to launch its first product later this year.
The Series D round was led by Spark Capital and supported by returnees Kleiner Perkins, Mayfield and Fidelity Investments. James Kuklinski of Spark Capital is also on the board of directors of Retym.
Retym builds a digital signal processing (DSP) chip. This is the type that helps you quickly move huge amounts of data across a wide range of data centers. As demand for AI continues to skyrocket, such a move has become important. In training large AI models like ChatGpt, when thousands of chips work together, those chips need to speak quickly and reliably with each other. That’s where the DSP comes in.
Currently, Marvell Technology dominates this part of the chip market. Retym wants to change that.
“The focus is to build coherent DSP chips for the next generation of AI infrastructure and the cloud,” said co-founder and CEO Sachin Gandhi.
According to Gandhi, data centers today are encountering serious bottlenecks. AI workloads are about connecting computing efficiently, not just raw calculations. As chips collaborate on machine learning tasks, communication delays slow everything down.
Retym’s chips are intended to solve this. The first version is designed to travel data over distances ranging from 10km to 120km, but is specially tuned with sweet spots ranging from 30km to 40km. To avoid data loss, the chip uses modulation techniques that keep the signal clean over long distances.
“They went straight for more difficult problems: long distances,” said Navin Chada, Mayfield’s managing partner.
Retym is building the chip using TSMC’s 5NM process and is currently testing early samples. This technology is tailored to high-bandwidth optical networks within and between data centers. AI infrastructure is hungry.
Retym’s programmable coherent DSP aims to become a fundamental part of future AI and cloud infrastructure. Series D funding helps the company move into production and continue developing new products. The goal is a multi-generational roadmap to meet the growing network demand from AI systems.
“As AI workloads continue to grow, they are pushing their infrastructure to that limit,” says Kuklinski. “The Retym team is uniquely positioned to address this and we are excited to support them as they build the future of AI networking.”
Chada of Mayfield called the team “exceptional” and said their work could define the next wave of AI infrastructure. Kleiner Perkins partner Mamoon Hamid reiterated the sentiment and said Retym’s approach to coherent DSP could fix some of the biggest limitations that hold back AI.
The timing may be correct. Analysts at Dell’oro Group estimate that global spending on data center computing and networking could exceed $1 trillion per year in the next decade. Retym is stepping into its market with technology that helps you move data faster, more efficiently and with less power.
“The old boundaries between the internal daTaCenter and the data center interconnections are beginning to blur,” said Vlad Kozlov, CEO of research firm Lightcounting. “Retym comes in the same way that the need for a smarter DSP is becoming inevitable.”
Gandhi says the company is just starting out. “We will work closely with our customers and partners to introduce DSPs to our next generation transceiver designs. They’ll be here soon.”
Founded by Sachin Gandhi (CEO) and Dr. Roni El-Bahar (CTO), Retym is a semiconductor startup focused on solving some of the toughest challenges in AI infrastructure and cloud connectivity. The company brings together top talents from Analog Design, DSP, VLSI and optical communications (optics backed by experienced investors) to build high-performance chips aimed at reconstructing the way data is moved through AI data centers.
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