Velaura AI raised $110 million in Series A at a $1 billion-plus valuation, led by Seligman Ventures with participation from new investors Capricorn Investment Group and Prosperity7 Ventures and existing backers Mayfield, Maverick Silicon, MARA, Premji Invest, Samsung Catalyst Fund, and StepStone Group. The Santa Clara semiconductor startup develops ultra-low-power silicon and software for AI data centers and Physical AI (robotics, autonomous systems). Founded as Auradine in 2022 (pivoting from Bitcoin mining chips to AI in March 2026), Velaura is led by CEO Rajiv Khemani, whose track record includes co-founding Innovium (sold to Marvell for $1.1B in 2021) and shipping billions of devices.
Velaura's core technology is Titan Core, a proprietary chip IP and design platform that claims to reduce power consumption for matrix multiplications (which account for up to 70% of AI accelerator energy use) by 2x to 4x without loss of compute throughput. The platform is license-based, not a chip sale, with customers paying royalties tied to measured power savings. Velaura has already deployed its technology in over 30 million ASICs at scale. The company is in active engagement with three of the four largest cloud providers, though none have been publicly named for large-scale deployments yet.
For infrastructure architects, Velaura signals that power availability—not compute demand—is now the binding constraint in AI scaling. Hyperscalers investing hundreds of billions in data centers face long electrical lead times and cooling limitations. A 2-4x power efficiency gain at the silicon level could unlock gigawatt-scale clusters that otherwise remain thermally infeasible. The key tests: whether Velaura's power savings transfer from lab to production on diverse workloads, and whether the licensing model gains traction faster than custom chip programs built by hyperscalers themselves. Watch for public hyperscaler deployment announcements as validation.