Trace Intelligence raises 100M+ yuan to build custom 6nm edge inference chip

Trace Intelligence (淬思科技) has closed a new nine-figure yuan funding round led by a major fund, with Yunqi Partners participating and existing investors Monolith and Fudan Science & Technology Innovation continuing to back the company. The startup plans to define, design, and tape out a 6nm custom inference chip with customers, starting with edge voice recognition. Founder Pan Hongyang argues that as AI model architectures converge and move into distillation and deployment, custom inference chips for fragmented edge scenarios such as wearables, AIoT, and security will offer better PPA than general-purpose GPUs or NPUs.