IBM teams up with Israeli startup NeuReality to build AI inference platforms

IBM and NeuReality, an Israeli AI systems and semiconductor company, have signed an agreement to develop high-performance AI inference platforms that are aiming to deliver disruptive cost and power consumption improvements for deep learning use cases. According to the companies, these platforms will enable critical sectors such as finance, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, and smart cities to deploy computer vision, Natural Language Processing, recommendation systems, and other AI use cases. The collaboration is also aimed at accelerating deployments in today’s ever-growing AI use cases which are already deployed in public and private cloud datacenters

"We are excited and deeply satisfied that a world-class multinational innovator like IBM is partnering with us," said Moshe Tanach, CEO and co-founder of NeuReality. "We believe our collaboration is a vote of confidence for our AI-centric technology and architecture and in its potential to power real life AI use cases with unprecedented deep learning capabilities.”

The agreement involves NR1, NeuReality’s first Server-on-a-Chip ASIC implementation of their AI-centric architecture. NR1 is based on NeuReality’s first generation FPGA-based NR1-P prototype platform that was introduced earlier this year. The NR1 will be a new type of integrated circuit device with native AI-over-Fabric networking, full AI pipeline offload and hardware-based AI hypervisor capabilities.

NeuReality emerged from stealth in February of this year, announcing its first-of-a-kind AI-centric architecture and laying out its roadmap. In September, NeuReality announced that it is collaborating with Xilinx to deliver their new AI-centric FPGA based NR1-P platforms to market.

NeuReality was founded in 2019 by CEO Moshe Tanach, VP Operations Tzvika Shmueli and VP VLSI Yossi Kasus. Prior to founding NeuReality, Tanach served in several executive roles as Director of Engineering at Marvell and Intel and AVP R&D at DesignArt-Networks (later acquired by Qualcomm). Tzvika Shmueli served as VP of Backend at Mellanox Technologies and VP of Engineering at Habana Labs. Yossi Kasus served as Senior Director of Engineering at Mellanox and the head of VLSI at EZChip.

“In light of IBM's vision to deliver the most advanced Hybrid Cloud and AI systems and services to our clients, teaming up with NeuReality, which brings a disruptive AI-centric approach to the table, is the type of industry collaboration we are looking for," said Dr. Mukesh Khare, Vice President of Hybrid Cloud research at IBM Research. "The partnership with NeuReality is expected to drive a more streamlined and accessible AI infrastructure, which has the potential to enhance people’s lives.”