Singapore's Acrab Raises US$130M Series B to Push Edge AI Silicon From Stealth to Revenue
Source: TNGlobal
Most of the AI conversation in Singapore runs through software — chatbots, copilots, policy frameworks — while the silicon underneath is designed elsewhere. Acrab, a Singapore-headquartered startup founded in 2024, is trying to change that with chips built to run large models where the user is,
Most of the AI conversation in Singapore runs through software — chatbots, copilots, policy frameworks — while the silicon underneath is designed elsewhere. Acrab, a Singapore-headquartered startup founded in 2024, is trying to change that with chips built to run large models where the user is, rather than in some distant cloud.
On Thursday, Acrab announced a US$130 million Series B round led by existing investors Vertex Ventures SEA & India and Vertex Growth, with participation from institutional investors across Europe and Southeast Asia. The round follows its emergence from stealth in June with more than US$350 million in cumulative funding, and pushes its total war chest past US$480 million. The company says the capital will fund product scaling, ecosystem expansion and its next-generation computing platform — and it expects revenue within this year, citing visible paths to industrial deployments across multiple domains.
The technical bet is the interesting part. Acrab's GΞLIX 1 is a first-generation edge AI system-on-chip designed to run large language models at the 100-billion-parameter scale locally, instead of shuttling data to the cloud. Its Agent Box is a personal edge AI system built around that chip, supporting local model inference, persistent memory, multimodal interactions and on-device agent orchestration — the kind of setup where an AI agent can act on your behalf without every thought leaving the room.
That positioning matters as agentic AI moves from demo to deployment. Cloud-dependent agents raise questions about latency, cost and data residency; edge compute answers all three. Singapore is already leaning into the category — US chipmaker Ambiq Micro listed on SGX in late July betting on Asia's edge AI appetite — and Acrab gives the city-state a homegrown name in the same segment. Vertex's continued backing also shows Southeast Asian capital will fund deep tech with long hardware timelines, not just software-on-demand.
Why it matters for Singapore: Acrab is one of the few locally headquartered companies designing AI silicon end-to-end, and its path to revenue this year is a test of whether Singapore can commercialise hardware ambition rather than just host it. If GΞLIX-powered devices find industrial buyers, Singapore gains a reference point in the edge AI supply chain — a useful hedge for an economy building its AI reputation mostly on talent, policy and data centres. The next few quarters will show whether the funding turns into products that leave the lab.
