[AI Infrastructure Startup Infinity Secures $15 Million in Funding, Valuation Reaches $100 Million, Backed by Touring Capital and Others] BlockBeats News, July 20: AI infrastructure startup Infinity announced the completion of a $15 million funding round, bringing the company's valuation to $100 million. The round was led by Touring Capital, Principal VC, and researchers from OpenAI and Anthropic. Infinity is dedicated to developing general-purpose AI inference software aimed at enabling various types of AI chips to run large models, thereby reducing developers' reliance on NVIDIA's CUDA ecosystem. One of the key reasons NVIDIA dominates the AI chip market is its CUDA software platform. CUDA allows GPUs, originally designed for graphics processing, to perform general-purpose computing tasks and serves as the foundation for mainstream AI development frameworks like PyTorch and TensorFlow, enabling developers to run their applications on NVIDIA hardware without additional adaptation. Infinity aims to create an alternative software stack similar to CUDA, supporting a variety of hardware architectures, including GPAmericaRAM, mobile chips, and Systolic Arrays, to enable AI applications to run across different chips. Infinity was founded last year by Jeremy Nixon, a former Google Brain researcher and founder of AGI House. Nixon stated that the company was established out of his research interest in "automated invention," with the goal of using AI systems to automatically generate the low-level code needed to optimize chip performance. The company's AI research agent, Ignition, can automatically write the low-level kernel code required for AI inference and continuously optimize it through testing, debugging, and performance evaluation to adapt to different chip architectures. Infinity claims that this system can continuously learn and automatically improve performance, aiming to build a software infrastructure comparable to CUDA. Currently, Infinity's clients include AI chip company D-Matrix, and the company is in discussions with other major chip manufacturers and cloud computing enterprises for potential collaborations. Infinity adopts a performance-based pricing model, charging no upfront licensing fees but instead taking a share of the performance improvements and cost savings achieved. Infinity currently has 26 employees and is emerging as one of the new startups challenging NVIDIA's dominance in the AI software ecosystem. [Original Article Link]