Efficient Computer, a startup with CMU ties, has raised $16 million in a seed funding round led by venture capital firm Eclipse Venture.
Efficient is introducing a computer processor it says is up to 100 times more energy-efficient than leading models in the current market.
The young company was launched in early 2022 by a team including professors and PhDs at Carnegie Mellon University as well as startup veterans.
“Our architecture expresses programs as a ‘circuit’ of instructions that shows which instructions talk to each other,” Brandon Lucia, Efficient co-founder and CEO, wrote in a blog post. “This model lets us lay out the circuit spatially across an array of extremely simple processors and execute the program in parallel, with much simpler hardware, and thus less energy, than any existing processor.”
Lucia, who briefly worked as a researcher at Microsoft Corp. in Redmond, Washington, joined CMU's faculty nine years ago and became a professor two years ago, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Lucia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
According to a blog post on Eclipse's website, the core intellectual property for Efficient's product originally came from CTO Graham Gobieski’s doctoral work at CMU. Lucia and Gobieski went on to found Efficient alongside Nathan Beckmann, a computer science professor at CMU, and Alex Hawkinson, an entrepreneur who previously served as CEO of SmartThings.
Eclipse said one of its investors discovered Efficient through a former colleague who had joined the Pittsburgh company as a digital design engineer.
Eclipse described Efficient's approach as "both practical and scrappy," and remarked on the startup's ability to "translate expertise in execution" in a short time frame.
The VC noted that the computer chip market is currently worth over $400 billion, and said Efficient could redefine the way the industry functions.
“The technology community’s long-held secret of highly inefficient general-purpose processors has slowed innovation and limited applications, particularly at the edge,” Greg Reichow, an Eclipse partner, said in a press release. “More than just closing this gap, the Efficient team is introducing an entirely new category of processor that is enabling organizations to reconsider what is possible.”
