Quadric rides the shift from cloud AI to on-device inference — and it’s paying off

Summary

Companies and governments are looking for tools to run AI locally in a a bid slash cloud infrastructure costs and build sovereign capability. Quadric, a chip-IP startup founded by veterans of early bitcoin mining firm 21E6, is trying to power that shift, scaling beyond automotive into laptops and industrial devices, with its on-device inference technology. That expansion is already paying off. Quadric posted $15 million to $20 million in licensing revenue in 2025, up from around $4 million in 2024, CEO Veerbhan Kheterpal (pictured above, center) told TechCrunch in an interview. The company, which is based in San Francisco and has an office in Pune, India, is targeting up to $35 million this year as it builds a royalty-driven on-device AI business. That growth has buoyed the company, which now has post-money valuation of between $270 million and $300 million, up from around $100 million in its 2022 Series B, Kheterpal said. It has also helped attract investors to company. Quadric announced last week a $30 million Series C round led by ACCELERATE Fund, managed by BEENEXT Capital Management, bringing its total funding to $72 million. The raise comes as investors and chipmakers look for ways to push more AI workloads from centralized cloud infrastructure onto devices and local servers, Kheterpal told TechCrunch. From automotive to everything Quadric began in automotive, where on-device AI can power real-time functions like driver assistance. Kheterpal said the spread of transformer-based models in 2023 pushed inference into “everything,” creating a sharp business inflection over the past 18 months as more companies try to run AI locally rather than rely on the cloud. “Nvidia is a strong platform for data-center AI,” Kheterpal said. “We were looking to build a similar CUDA-like or programmable infrastructure for on-device AI.” Unlike Nvidia, Quadric does not make chips itself. Instead, it licenses programmable AI processor IP, which Kheterpal described as a “blueprint” t...