According to published reports, Nervana Systems, a startup developing a scalable hardware solution to support brain-inspired algorithms, has raised $600,000 in a funding round. The funding came from Ali and Hadi Partovi, Sam Altman, Geoff Ralston, Scott Banister, Owen Van Natta, Eric Baker, Farzad Khosrowshahi, Dara Khosrowshahi, Allen & Co., Aditya Agrawal, Ruchi Sanghvi, and SV Angel.

Founded by experts in machine learning, neuroscience, processor architecture, and chip design, Nervana Systems is bringing unprecedented scale and simplicity to the application of brain-inspired algorithms. Deep learning has emerged as the leading strategy for making sense of a wide variety of data but is very compute intensive. We are developing a scalable hardware solution to solve these types of problems. By making unsupervised learning dramatically faster and more scalable, customers at all levels can derive meaningful insights from their data, an ability previously available only to an elite few companies.