AI startup Mythic raises $40M Series B led by SoftBank to help bring its high-speed low-power AI chip to market
Mythic, which last year unveiled its novel computer chip designed for artificial intelligence, announced today that it has raised $40 million in a Series B fundraising round led …
Context & Ripple Effects
When Mythic unveiled its analog processing unit last year, the pitch was that AI inference could run inside memory itself rather than on power-hungry digital processors. SoftBank's $40M Series B is the capital meant to turn that lab demo into a shippable product, placing the Japanese investor alongside a wave of backers betting that edge AI needs its own silicon class.
The arc since then has been long: Mythic needed a $30M Series B1 extension in 2019 just to keep building toward its $86M total, then a $70M Series C in 2021, and only in late 2025 did it land a $125M round led by DCVC under a new Nvidia-veteran CEO — evidence of how capital-intensive analog compute-in-memory has proven to commercialize.
First-order effects
- SoftBank's $40M funds Mythic's transition from chip unveiling to market entry, paying for manufacturing and go-to-market work on a part whose selling point is high-speed inference at low power.
Second-order effects
- Syntiant's $25M Series B later that year — backed by Microsoft's M12, Alexa Fund, and Intel Capital — shows rivals racing to claim adjacent slices of the ultra-low-power AI chip market before Mythic establishes a lead.
Third-order effects
- The seven-year funding trail from this $40M round to the 2025 DCVC-led raise suggests analog compute-in-memory startups need patient, repeated capital infusions to survive against entrenched digital accelerators — a structure that favors deep-pocketed investors like SoftBank and DCVC over conventional venture timelines.
The trend: Edge AI is spawning a distinct silicon category built on compute-in-memory architectures, sustained by successive large rounds from investors willing to fund multi-year hardware roadmaps.