Gunderson Dettmer represented client Quiet Capital in co-leading the $50 million financing of Taalas, a Canadian innovator in AI and silicon. Taalas is developing an automated flow for rapidly implementing all types of deep learning models (Transformers, SSMs, Diffusers, MoEs, etc.) in silicon. The efficiency of hard-wired computation enables a single chip to outperform a small GPU data center, opening the way to a 1000x improvement in the cost of AI.

Taalas is taping out its first large language model chip in the third quarter of 2024 and planning to make it available to early customers in the first quarter of 2025.

In the announcement of the transaction, Quiet Capital partner Matt Humphrey said, "We believe the Taalas 'direct-to-silicon' foundry unlocks three fundamental breakthroughs: dramatically resetting the cost structure of AI today, viably enabling the next 10-100x growth in model size, and efficiently running powerful models locally on any consumer device. This is perhaps the most important mission in computing today for the future scalability of AI. And we are proud to support this remarkable n-of-1 team as they do it.”

The Gunderson Dettmer deal team was led by Michael Allers and included Aaron Rubin, Benjamin Adler and Caitlin Peltz.

Owens Wright LLP in Toronto represented Taalas in the offering. The Owens Wright team was led by Paul De Luca and included William Quaglietta and Rojin Jazayeri.

Companies
Quiet Capital 
Taalas