Mobileye founder's doubleAI raises $200M to cut compute costs by optimising running code
What's the deal? Amnon Shashua, the Mobileye founder, has emerged from stealth with doubleAI and its first product, Maxwell — an AI that optimises how software runs to cut computing costs. The Tel Aviv company raised $200 million in a Series A co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners, valuing it at more than $1 billion.
Who's backing it? Dell Technologies Capital, Nvidia, Greenfield, Pitango, and BRM joined the round. Dell Technologies Capital, which led the earlier seed round, backed a model-building company for the first time, said managing partner Yair Snir.
What's the endgame? DoubleAI calls its technology "Code Execution Models," which sit "between the code and the silicon." Unlike coding agents that help write software, Maxwell analyses a running program, its hardware, and its data, then optimises the underlying machine instructions — without changing the source code.
The company says Maxwell works with both CPUs and GPUs and formally verifies every change mathematically, ensuring optimisations do not alter a program's behaviour. DoubleAI reports Maxwell has made data pipelines more than 38 times faster and AI inference kernels more than 4.5 times faster on real-world workloads. Those are company figures, with limited public detail on tests or baselines.
Why now? Maxwell arrives as rising AI inference costs and compute scarcity have made software-level efficiency a strategic priority. Nvidia and open-source projects are already chasing gains through optimised kernels and GPU scheduling; doubleAI's pitch is to tune a running program rather than rewrite code or manage infrastructure. It plans to charge customers a share of the savings it delivers.
What could go wrong? The reported speedups remain company claims with limited public test data. The open question is whether Maxwell can deliver reliable, repeatable gains across production workloads beyond the optimisations already available in established software stacks.
DoubleAI employs roughly 40 people and has raised about $220 million since inception, spending roughly half on 1,000 Nvidia B300 chips. Maxwell is now available for early access through the company's website.
The signal: A $200 million Series A for a 40-person startup, backed by Nvidia and Dell, is a substantial bet that the next frontier in AI economics lies not in bigger models but in squeezing more out of the hardware already running them.
Read more: calcalistech.com, Techmeme (WSJ)
