Serial entrepreneur Avigdor Willenz founds new chip startup

Serial entrepreneur and chip investor Avigdor Willens has founded a secret company, in collaboration with his former partners in Havana Labsa new AI chip startup called Touch, which according to the founders’ shared history could lead to a massive exit within a few years.

Touch’s founding team includes CEO David Dahan and VP of development Ran Halutz, who along with Willens founded graphics processor developer Habana Labs, which was sold to Intel for $2 billion in 2019. In recent months, as Intel has been making organizational changes at Habana Labs, which include ending its status as an independent company and making it subordinate to three Intel divisions, there has been a wave of departures by senior executives, including Dahan and Halutz, who have remained there since the acquisition.

Wellens, Dahan and Halutz registered their new company earlier this month as Element Labs and have raised several million dollars of their own money, along with Wellens’ American friend Manuel Alba, who has co-founded several companies with Wellens including Galileo — Wellens’ first venture in more than 20 years. Element Labs is likely a temporary name, as the founders prefer to call the company Touch.

Protests and Exit from Israel

Touch’s temporary address is listed as the Azrieli Towers in Tel Aviv, possibly because it houses the law firm of Arnon Tadmor Levy, which handles Willens’ business affairs in Israel. Attorney Orly Zioni, a partner in the firm, owns shares in the company, according to the corporate registry, and may be acting as trustee for additional investors whose names have not yet been disclosed. Willens tends to base his startups in the north, near his former home in Kibbutz Hanita. In the past, he has set up companies in Yokneam, Haifa and Caesarea. In an interview with Globes last year, Willens, who moved to Switzerland as a protest against the Israeli government and tax authorities, said he would halt new investments in Israel but would support Israeli entrepreneurs setting up businesses abroad.

What does Wilentz, a 67-year-old entrepreneur, have planned for the AI ​​industry? All the details about the company are shrouded in mystery, with the company’s founders playing their cards quietly. Senior industry sources believe the company is developing AI chips for inference — where end users run AI engines trained by the companies that developed them. Every query in OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Microsoft’s Copilot is an inference operation, and according to estimates, most of the growth in AI activity in the coming years will come from inference rather than model training.

According to the big source, the Touch chips will be designed for small, local data centers, a new and growing market that helps shift the load of AI processing activity from large data centers to population centers. In this way, AI processing, which is expensive and consumes large amounts of electricity, is spread across many servers located nearby and places less of a burden on consumer devices.

The Pioneer Who Became a Billionaire

Wellens is a world leader in server processors and became a billionaire at the turn of the century when he sold Galileo, the chip company he founded in Karmiel, to Marvell Technologies for $2.7 billion. Wellens then sold semiconductor startups like Pixar Technology to Carl Zeiss for $70 million and in 2013 sold Annapurna Labs to Amazon for $370 million, a strategic acquisition by Amazon in the field of artificial intelligence. Annapurna’s server chips are now worth billions of dollars to the cloud computing and retail giant.

In recent weeks, Habana Labs has been merged with Intel after maintaining its independence for five years. At the time of the acquisition in 2019, Willenz sought to copy Mobileye’s model and maintain its independence. The two processors developed by Habana and launched by Intel, Gaudi 1 and Gaudi 2, have failed to capture market share from their competitors Nvidia and AMD, and after the launch of Gaudi 3 in the coming weeks, Intel plans to use only the Habana GPU core and combine it with technology taken from internal development to launch Falcon Shore, based on 1.8nm.

There has been no response from any of the founders of the new startup.

This article was published in Globes, Israeli Business News – en.globes.co.il – on August 21, 2024.

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