Serial entrepreneur and chip investor Avigdor Willenz has founded in stealth, together with his former partners at Habana Labs, a new AI chip startup called Touch, which to judge by the joint record of the founders could lead to a huge exit in several years.
Touch's founding team includes CEO David Dahan and VP development Ran Halutz who together with Willenz founded graphic processor developer Habana Labs, which was sold to Intel for $2 billion in 2019. In recent months, with the procedures of organizational changes being undertaken by Intel at Habana Labs, which includes ending its status as an independent company and making it subject to three Intel divisions , there has been a wave of departures by senior executives, including Dahan and Halutz, who have remained there since the acquisition.
Willenz, Dahan and Halutz registered their new company earlier this month under the name of Element Labs and have raised several million dollars of their own money, together with Willenz's American friend Manuel Alba, who has been involved in founding many companies with Willenz including Galileo - Willenz's first exit more than 20 years ago. Element Labs is probably a temporary name with the founders preferring to call the company Touch.
The protests and departure from Israel
Touch's temporary address has been listed as the Azrieli towers in Tel Aviv, probably because it houses the Arnon Tadmor-Levy law firm, which handles Willenz's business affairs in Israel. Adv. Orly Tsioni, a partner at the firm, holds shares in the company, according to the companies' registry, and it could be that she is acting as a trustee for additional investors whose names have yet to be disclosed. Willenz tends to found his startups in the north, near his former home on Kibbutz Hanita. In the past, he founded companies in Yokneam, Haifa and Caesarea. In an interview with "Globes" last year, Willenz, who has moved to Switzerland as an act of protest against the Israeli government and Tax Authority, said that he would halt new investments in Israel, but would support Israeli entrepreneurs who set up their companies abroad.
What is Willenz, the 67-year-old entrepreneur planning for the AI industry? Every detail related to the company is shrouded in mystery, with the company's founders playing their cards close to their chest. Senior sources in the industry believe that the company develops AI chips for inference - in which end users operate AI engines by, that have been trained by the companies that developed them. Every query in OpenAI's ChatGPT or in Microsoft's copilot is considered an inference operation, and according to estimates, most growth in AI activity in the coming years will come from inference and not from model training stages.
According to the senior source's assessment, Touch's chips will be designed for small and local data centers, a new and growing market that helps transfer the load on AI processing activity from large data centers to population centers. In this way, AI processing operations, which are considered expensive and consume large amounts of electricity, are spread to many servers located nearby and do not put less load onto consumer end devices.
The pioneer who became a billionaire
Willenz is a global pioneer in processors for servers who became a billionaire at the start of the century when he sold Galileo, the chip company he had set up in Karmiel, to Marvell Technologies for $2.7 billion. Then Willenz sold semiconductor startups such as Pixer Technology to Carl Zeiss for $70 million and in 2013 he sold Annapurna Labs to Amazon for $370 million, which became a strategic acquisition by Amazon in AI. Annapurna's server chips bring in billions of dollars today for the cloud computing and retail giant.
In recent weeks Habana Labs has been merged into Intel after maintaining its independence for five years. At the time of the acquisition in 2019, Willenz sought to copy the Mobileye model and maintain independence. The two Habana-developed processors launched by Intel, Gaudi 1 and Gaudi 2 have not been able to capture market share from rivals Nvidia and AMD, and after launching Gaudi 3 in the coming weeks, Intel plans to use only the core of Habana's graphic processor and integrate it with the technology taken from internal development to launch Falcon Shore, based on 1.8 nanometer.
No response was forthcoming from any of the new startup's founders.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on August 21, 2024.
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