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Investing in Eridu

  • Mar 10
  • 3 min read

This article was authored by Eileen Tanghal.

Back in the 2000s, Andreesen Horowitz stated that software would eat the world. At the time, I wrote that in order for software to eat the world, they would need a knife and fork. Over the last five years, we have seen that the major limitation to AI adoption has indeed been the compute infrastructure, sending stock prices of companies like the Nvidia and Arm to skyrocket. 


Over the past three years, Black Opal has primarily focused on the convergence of the technology of advanced technology with applications to improve healthcare and reverse Eroom’s law in drug development. At the same time, we have kept our eye on infrastructure – the knives and forks needed to ensure these applications can be rolled out to anyone and everyone.


I have spent the majority of my 25 years working with semiconductor companies (Arm, Applied Materials, PDF Solutions) and investing in hardware tech companies like Edge Impulse, EdgeQ, Cerberas, and Mythic during my IQT days. I am thrilled to announce the first semiconductor + systems company in the Black Opal Ventures portfolio, Eridu AI.

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The Network Bottleneck Throttling AI

Although AI compute is advancing in performance and scale at breakneck speed, networking is not keeping up. Demands for data movement are growing exponentially as hyperscalers, frontier labs and neoclouds pursue an all-out race to build ever-larger AI data centers. At the same time, new architectural and algorithmic innovations in AI are only making the network bottleneck worse.


Current solutions and the roadmaps promised by incumbent and new providers continue down the path of incremental enhancements to the same architecture. That path only increases latency, power demands, cooling requirements, inefficiency and costs. Networking technology has fallen so far behind that a completely new design is required.


Reengineering Networking for AI

Eridu has developed a clean-sheet design for the demands of AI. Eridu’s network switch delivers the order-of-magnitude advance in performance, radix and efficiency needed to meet current and future AI demands.


With a clean break from the limits and trade-offs of current architectures, Eridu delivers previously impossible capabilities including:

  • Fewer network tiers to reduce latency and network jitter

  • Single-hop scale-up domains with thousands of GPUs

  • Scale-out domains of millions of GPUs

  • Up to 40% savings in CapEx

  • Up to 70% savings in networking power

  • Faster deployment of AI data centers


This funding will be used to complete development of Eridu’s solution. For more information, visit eridu.ai.


About Eridu

Eridu is the pioneer advancing the frontier in AI networking with a solution built from the ground up to deliver the bandwidth, performance and reliability at scale needed by AI data centers. Eridu’s solutions are designed to address the massive scale demanded by hyperscalers, but the solution is extensible to a broad set of markets including neoclouds, sovereign clouds and large enterprise AI data centers. Founded by a team of accomplished technology and business innovators, Eridu is challenging market incumbents and current AI networking solutions.


Eridu is backed by leading investors including Black Opal Ventures, Bosch Ventures, Capricorn Investment Group, Catapult Ventures, Chamaeleon, Eclipse Capital, Fathom Fund, Friends & Family Capital, Fusion Fund, Godfrey Capital, Hudson River Trading, Hyperlink, John Doerr, Leslie Enterprises, Matter Venture Partners, MediaTek, Modi Ventures, Ohio Innovation, Open Field Capital, Osage University Partners, Perkins Enterprises, Pierre Lamond, Rice Management, SBVA, Socratic Partners, Struck Capital, TDK Ventures, Triple Point Capital, VentureTech Alliance, Zelda Ventures and numerous others. 


 
 
 

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