Zurich, Switzerland—Mosaic SoC said on April 30 that it has raised $3.8 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Founderful, with participation from Kick Foundation, as it develops low-power perception chips for consumer devices.
The Zurich-based company is building integrated circuits designed to help devices process visual and positional sensor data in real time. Its technology is aimed at wearables and mobile devices, including AR glasses and smartphone cameras, where battery life, heat and device size remain major constraints.
Mosaic SoC said the next generation of consumer hardware will need to do more than capture images. Devices such as AR glasses, always-on cameras and AI-enabled mobile products will require real-time spatial awareness, allowing them to interpret their surroundings rather than only record them.
Today, the company said, many of these capabilities depend on application-class processors and GPUs, which can consume too much power for lightweight wearable formats. This creates a gap between the spatial-intelligence features device makers want to offer and the hardware that can support them within a small power budget.
Addressing the power limits of spatial computing
Mosaic SoC is developing dedicated perception chips intended to provide a baseline layer of spatial intelligence for energy-constrained devices. The company said its chips are designed to be integrated by original design manufacturers, or ODMs, into next-generation AR and mobile hardware.
Instead of requiring device makers to build perception systems from the ground up, Mosaic SoC provides both the chip and a full application layer that ODMs can integrate and develop on top of. The company argues that this approach could reduce system complexity for hardware manufacturers.
“Spatial intelligence shouldn’t require an application-class processor and a GPU,” said Alfio Di Mauro, CEO and co-founder of Mosaic SoC. “We built Mosaic SoC to deliver real-time perception at a fraction of the energy, so battery-powered devices can understand their environment without compromising form factor.”
The company describes its technology as converting space into signals. Its chips process visual and positional data so that a device can understand where it is and what is around it in real time.
For smart glasses, Mosaic SoC said the goal is to enable spatial-awareness capabilities in devices small and efficient enough to resemble regular glasses. For smartphones, the chip could operate as a co-processor for the front camera, supporting always-on tracking and classification while using less power than conventional processing stacks.
Potential functions include building a local map of a user’s surroundings, identifying objects within that environment, recalling where an item was last seen, generating a floor plan in real time, or triggering recording only when a specific event or object is detected.
Founded by ETH Zurich researchers
Mosaic SoC was founded by Moritz Scherer and Alfio Di Mauro, both PhDs from ETH Zurich with experience in system-on-chip architecture. The company said its founders identified a widening gap between demand for edge intelligence and the capabilities of existing hardware.
The startup’s business model is based on selling integrated circuits. In its first year, Mosaic SoC said it has already generated revenue through non-recurring engineering contracts with ODM partners. As its chips move toward the market, the company expects its revenue mix to shift from engineering engagements toward product revenue from chip sales.
The company’s core technical differentiation is its chip architecture. Mosaic SoC said that while competing approaches often rely on single- or dual-core ARM-based designs, its chips use a proprietary multi-core architecture with eight or more cores. The architecture is designed to improve performance per watt and support always-on perception in devices with strict power limits.
Mosaic SoC is also developing AI deployment toolchains and compilers intended to help firmware developers use the architecture more efficiently. Over time, the company plans to move from being a chip supplier to a broader platform provider, where applications can be developed, deployed and optimized around its silicon.
Antonia Albert, investor at Founderful, said the company is addressing a key hardware requirement for future smart devices.
“The next billion smart devices will see and understand the world around them. Mosaic SoC's product is the chip that makes that possible at scale. Moritz and Alfio have the architecture, the platform vision, and the team to make it happen. We are proud to back them with Founderful on their journey to define the spatial computing era.”
Mosaic SoC said its long-term aim is to become a standard layer for spatial intelligence at the edge, enabling always-on perception in wearables and mobile devices without the power, heat and complexity tradeoffs that have limited the category.
