A startup chip maker, Positron, has raised US$23.5 million to scale its AI chip production, with funding from Valor Equity Partners, Atreides Management, Flume Ventures, and Resilience Reserve.

Positron’s chips are designed for AI inference, the phase when a model is actively used, rather than for training.

Manufactured in Arizona, Positron’s AI inference chips use less than one-third of the power of Nvidia’s H100 while delivering comparable performance.

While demand is higher for AI training chips, analysts expect inference chips to gain traction as AI adoption grows across industries.