Esperanto Technologies

Dave Ditzel had already changed computing once. In 1980 he co-authored "The Case for the Reduced Instruction Set Computer" with David Patterson — the paper that seeded the RISC revolution. He went on to found Transmeta, whose power-sipping x86-compatible chips drew a young Linus Torvalds as an engineer. By 2014, Ditzel was ready to place another long-odds bet: that the open RISC-V instruction set could be the backbone of the AI-chip era.

Founded in Mountain View, Esperanto operated quietly before emerging at a RISC-V Workshop with a contrarian thesis. Instead of chasing raw peak throughput with a few fat cores, Ditzel proposed tiling more than a thousand lean, energy-efficient RISC-V cores across a single die and letting the parallel nature of machine-learning inference do the rest. Do more per watt, not merely more per clock — the philosophy he had chased his whole career.

Investors bought the thesis. In November 2018 Esperanto closed a $58M Series B, bringing total funding to roughly $63M, with backers including Western Digital. The money funded a serious silicon program: a 7nm system-on-chip, the ET-SoC-1, integrating 1,092 RISC-V cores (1,088 small "ET-Minion" inference engines plus four larger "ET-Maxion" cores) designed to stay under ~20 watts while delivering 100+ TOPS of inference.

The chip taped out at TSMC and was revealed at Hot Chips in August 2021 — real silicon, not a slide deck, and the largest RISC-V core count put on a single commercial chip at the time. By April 2022 Samsung SDS was running a formal evaluation and publicly praised the chip's near-linear scaling across cluster configurations. For a moment, the watts-per-inference pitch looked like it might land with the hyperscalers quietly uneasy about Nvidia's pricing power.

Evaluation is not revenue. The launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 reoriented every enterprise AI budget toward Nvidia's H100s and the CUDA ecosystem — a decade-deep software moat that Esperanto's stack could not escape. The market rewarded raw throughput and ecosystem compatibility over the energy efficiency that was Esperanto's entire differentiator.

The talent problem compounded it. CEO Art Swift later put it bluntly: deep-pocketed competitors raided the company with packages "two, three, even four times higher" than a startup with $63M to its name could match. Engineers holding the irreplaceable microarchitecture knowledge left steadily. A late pivot — a Generative AI Appliance announced in 2023 to run open LLMs on ET-SoC-1 clusters — was credible but entered an already-crowded field against Nvidia cards that got more efficient every generation.

By mid-2025 the attrition crossed a point of no return. Esperanto wound down its silicon business, cutting roughly 90% of its Mountain View staff — from a peak near 140 — and closing its European subsidiaries in Spain and Serbia. Swift and a skeleton crew stayed to find a buyer or IP licensee.

In November 2025, Ainekko, an open-source AI-hardware startup, acquired Esperanto's full IP portfolio — RTL, tooling, frameworks, reference designs — and committed to open-sourcing the many-core RISC-V architecture on GitHub. The ET-SoC-1 design would live on, just not as a commercial product. Swift noted that by the time of the closure, about 95% of former employees had already found new roles. A decade-long bet on a more elegant way to do inference ended not with a failed chip, but with a company that simply could not out-pay the giants it had hoped to out-engineer.