Esperanto Technologies, a company focused on developing energy-efficient many-core accelerators for artificial intelligence and machine learning applications, has announced the closure of a whopping $58 million in Series B funding – more than 10 times its previous investment rounds combined.

“Despite still operating largely in stealth mode, we appreciate this strong show of support from strategic and VC investors who had confidential briefings about our plans and believe we have a compelling solution for accelerating ML applications,” claims president and chief executive Dave Ditzel, co-author of the paper The Case for RISC and founder of low-power x86 specialist Transmeta. “Esperanto has assembled one of the most experienced VLSI [very large scale integration] product engineering teams in the ML [machine learning] industry, and we believe that will be a differentiating factor as we drive toward our 7nm products.”

It’s the push to 7nm which has prompted the funding round, the company explains: it aims to build its accelerator hardware, the ET-Minion, on an energy-efficient 7nm process node with more than a thousand RISC-V cores per chip. As well as the open RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) itself, the company is leveraging other open standards including the Open Compute Platform (OCP), Pytorch machine learning framework, Glow machine learning compiler, and the Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX).

More information on the company’s technology, a release date for which has not yet been provided, can be found on the official website.