Can Vinod Dham-founded AlphaICs disrupt the AI-based chip market?

The firm operates in the mid-power segment worth $15-20 billion, and is designing a chip targeted for vision applications like surveillance, industrial automation and IoT

Internet-enabled consumer apps may have hogged the limelight, but the next decade could belong to the semiconductor industry, said Pradeep Vajram, chairman and chief executive at AlphaICs, a California- and Bengaluru-based chip maker. AlphaICs recently raised $8 million in a series B funding to develop a portfolio of chipsets for artificial intelligence workloads.

While behemoths like Qualcomm, Intel and Samsung dominate the industry, recent times have seen a spurt in startups producing niche chips for heavy-duty computing like machine learning and big data analytics. The new generation of chips are designed to support parallel processing at low power and latency, making