Israel-Based NeuroBlade raises $23M Series A from Check Point co-founder Marius Nacht, Intel Capital, and others to bring its AI chip to market
TEL AVIV (Reuters) - Israeli startup NeuroBlade said on Wednesday it has completed a $23 million early funding round, led by Marius Nacht …
Context & Ripple Effects
NeuroBlade's $23M Series A — led by Check Point co-founder Marius Nacht with Intel Capital aboard — is the early bet on a processing-in-memory approach to AI compute, funding the move from design to shipping silicon. The thesis was later validated at scale when the company raised an $83M Series B that took total funding to $110M.
The round also slots into a crowded Israeli AI-silicon field: Hailo climbed through successive rounds to a $1.2B valuation on a $120M Series C extension, while NeuReality later raised a $35M Series A for low-cost inferencing chips — meaning NeuroBlade is one of several Israeli teams chasing the same data-center and analytics buyers.
First-order effects
- NeuroBlade gets the capital to tape out and bring its AI chip to market, with Intel Capital's participation giving it a strategic channel into Intel's ecosystem rather than just money.
Second-order effects
- Hailo and NeuReality now compete with NeuroBlade for the same pool of Israeli deep-tech capital and enterprise analytics customers, pushing each toward sharper differentiation between edge inference and in-memory analytics.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — small validation rounds followed by nine-figure follow-ons for Hailo and NeuroBlade — Israel consolidates into a recognized AI-chip cluster where founder-investors like Marius Nacht recycle earlier exits into the next hardware generation.
The trend: Israeli AI chip startups are scaling from modest Series A validation rounds to nine-figure war chests as strategic and local capital races to back alternatives to incumbent processors.