Vaire Computing Raises $4.5M for 'Reversible Computing' Moonshot

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Hannah Earley and Rodolfo Rosini, Vaire Computing

With the rise of AI, energy and heat efficiency have become pressing concerns for companies that use and build chips. The skyrocketing demand for hardware to run AI models is driving up energy bills, as these servers require vast numbers of chips and enormous cooling setups.

Vaire Computing, based in London and Seattle, is betting that reversible computing will be the way forward. The company has raised $4 million in a Seed round to work on building silicon chips that would consume negligible amounts of energy and generate little heat, if any. The round was led by deep-tech fund 7percent Ventures and Jude Gomila, the co-founder of Heyzap. The company had previously raised $500,000, so this round brings its total funding to $4.5 million.

In reversible computing, instead of running a calculation in only one direction (inputs followed by outputs) and then feeding the output to a new calculation and running it again, the computing can be done in both directions (known as ‘time-reversible’ computing). Effectively, energy is retained inside the chip instead of being released as heat. The theory is that this method would generate negligible amounts of heat, vastly reducing energy consumption.

Vaire Computing was founded by serial entrepreneur Rodolfo Rosini, and Hannah Earley, a researcher at the University of Cambridge who works on “unconventional computing” such as reversible and molecular computing.

Rosini explained that close to 100% of the energy in a chip ends up being dissipated as heat. However, in a reversible chip, the energy is recycled internally, meaning the chip doesn’t get hot, and only a tiny amount of energy is needed to make it work.

The concept of reversible computing is not new, and there are many challenges to overcome before Vaire’s chips can become a reality. However, Rosini believes the shift to this new approach to computing would not be too dissimilar from how we switched from filament bulbs to LEDs.

Earley believes reversible computing could be used to make the most powerful computers. She got involved in this area during her PhD in 2016 and started to think that reversible computing is interesting in its own right, particularly as it could make the most powerful form of computers possible.

The round also saw participation from Seedcamp, Clim8, Tom Knight (an inventor of modern reversible computing), and Jared Kopf, founder of Ramble.ai. Additionally, Vaire has hired Mike Frank, a noted researcher in reversible computing, as the company’s senior scientist.

Vaire recently became one of only ten companies named to the second U.K. cohort of Intel Ignite, Intel’s global startup accelerator program for early-stage deep tech startups.