The first AI chip startup to go public in 2025 will be Blaize

NVIDIA’s rise has spurred renewed investor interest in AI chip startups. One of them, Blaze, founded by former Intel engineers, is set to go public on NASDAQ on Tuesday in a SPAC deal, it announced Monday.

Launched in 2011, Blaze has raised $335 million from investors such as Samsung and Mercedes-Benz. Headquartered in El Dorado Hills, California, it focuses on developing AI chips for edge applications. Instead of being used mostly in massive data centers (like NVIDIA), its chips are meant to be integrated into smart products like security cameras, drones and industrial robots.

“AI-powered edge computing is the future due to its benefits of low power consumption, low latency, cost-effectiveness and data privacy,” CEO Dinakar Munagala, who previously worked for Intel for nearly 12 years, said in a statement to TechCrunch.

Blaze is currently a small player in the vast AI chip industry and is highly unprofitable, losing $87.5 million on revenue of just $3.8m in 2023, the most recent year available for its financials, according to in its prospectus. However, chip makers need a lot of capital to build their manufacturing (which Blaise says is done in the US) before they can really start scaling.

“As you can imagine, [as a] In chip companies you invest heavily and when the hockey stick comes in, it climbs,” Munagala told TechCrunch.

Blaze also has $400 million worth of deals in the pipeline. A deal on its investor deck heralds a signed purchase order of up to $104 million with an unnamed EMEA “defense entity,” possibly in the Middle East, for a system that can identify unknown or friendly troops, identify small boats and detect drones. (Munagala declined to say exactly which country.)

Munagala told TechCrunch that he expects Blaze to be valued at $1.2 billion after the SPAC merger. That’s lower than the private valuations of other companies like Cerebras, a closely watched AI chipmaker that filed for an IPO last fall, and was looking to double its $4 billion valuationTechCrunch previously reported. However, Cerebras has yet to go public, as some investors are wary of its over-reliance on a single customer in the Middle East. investors told CNBC.

Unlike Blaze, though, Cerebras focuses on data center chips. Blaze going public is ultimately a bet on a future where AI chips move from those centralized data centers to being more integrated into physical products.

“All the AI ​​hype is happening in the data center. Interestingly, they have completely neglected and forgotten the real physical world use cases that are very real, that are touching people’s lives and happening now and making money,” Munagala told TechCrunch. “We are focused on the practical use of AI in the physical world.”