Silicon Valley chip startup Velaura AI said on Tuesday it has raised a $110 million Series A at a valuation of more than $1 billion, pitching its Titan Core silicon-design platform as an answer to AI's growing electricity crunch. Seligman Ventures led the round with new investor Capricorn Investment Group, joined by existing backers Samsung Catalyst Fund, StepStone Group, Prosperity7 Ventures, Mayfield, MARA, Premji Invest and Maverick Silicon.
Titan Core Bets Power Efficiency Is The Next Bottleneck
Velaura, formerly known as Auradine, says its Titan Core IP delivers a 2x to 4x improvement in performance per watt for the mathematical operations AI accelerators lean on hardest — enough to shave roughly 500 W off a typical 1000 W GPU or XPU without changing customers' RTL. The technology has already been deployed across more than 30 million ASICs, a rare production track record for a young silicon startup and a key data point for hyperscaler qualification cycles.
From Hyperscale To Physical AI
CEO Rajiv Khemani, a chip industry veteran with previous stops at Auradine, is aiming the money at two markets. One is the data center, where new build-outs increasingly bump into grid interconnects and generation limits rather than compute demand. The other is physical AI — robots, drones and autonomous machines that must run heavier AI workloads under strict power and thermal budgets. Velaura says it is already engaged with leading hyperscalers on future XPU roadmaps, alongside engineering hires drawn from Apple, NVIDIA, Google, Qualcomm and Marvell.
Power Joins Capital As An AI Constraint
The Series A lands as the industry's compute build-out shifts from a GPU-supply story to an energy-supply story. See related coverage of NVIDIA's $105B Ohio backstop for OpenAI, Point2's $136M Series B for AI interconnects and Energy Vault's 1.25 GW BESS for a Texas AI data center.
Reporting based on Velaura AI's August 18, 2026 announcement and coverage from Reuters via Yahoo Finance and TechStartups.