Spark, Mayfield, and Kleiner Perkins pour another $75M into AI data center chipmaker Retym

Retym, a U.S. chipmaker with Israeli roots, has raised a fresh $75 million series D led by James Kuklinski of Spark Capital. Existing investors — Mayfield’s Navin Chaddha and Kleiner Perkins’ Mamoon Hamid — also participated, bringing its total raised to $180 million, it says.

The chipmaker is another startup benefiting from AI’s glow-up. Its chips don’t process AI workloads directly — it’s not a Nvidia GPU competitor. It’s working on a new “programmable coherent digital signal processing DSP” chip that allows the innards of data centers to communicate faster both internally and with external sources.

Data centers needed this kind of tech anyway, but the sudden rise of AI has put overwhelming pressure on them to be faster, more efficient, and handle bigger workloads. 

The company was founded in 2021 but has been quiet about itself until Monday, when it announced this Series D round. Its CTO co-founder, Roni El-Bahar, published his first blog post on Monday, saying he founded the startup to bring competition to the DSP market that has historically been “controlled by a handful of large semiconductor companies.”

He was largely referring to Marvell Technology, which currently dominates the DSP industry and has partnerships with Nvidia, Juniper Networks, and many others.

Retym — pronounced “re-time” — is using TSMC’s state-of-the-art 5 nanometer fab for its first chip, which is being tested now, the company told Reuters. 

Retym did not immediately respond to a request for comment.