Silicon Catalyst Announces Brain-CA as Newest Company in Semiconductor Accelerator

Brain-CA Technologies Closes $5 Million Funding to Advance Cellular Automata-Based AI Processor

Silicon Valley, CA – June 30, 2026 – Brain-CA Technologies, a deep tech startup, has recently been admitted into Silicon Catalyst's highly acclaimed program for the semiconductor industry. Brain-CA is developing a novel AI processor architecture grounded in cellular automata and Bayes-like belief updating. The company’s mission is to rebuild AI’s foundation around energy-efficient AI, prioritizing speed, sustainability, and real-world portability, focused on efficiency instead of scale. Brain-CA is setting a new benchmark for intelligent computing—one that delivers smarter performance with a smaller footprint.

Brain-CA receives funding from First Trust Capital Partners

Brain-CA has recently closed a $5 million seed funding round, exceeding their initial $3 million target and bringing the company's total capital raised to $7.2 million. Proceeds from the funding round will be deployed across three priorities: advancing the chip design of the company's next-generation chip, growing the engineering team with deep semiconductor and ML systems expertise, and establishing strategic commercial partnerships in target verticals.

"We were drawn to Brain-CA because we believe three things align with the company: an experienced management team with decades of expertise in building, a genuinely novel architecture we had not encountered in the market, and a problem—the memory and energy bottleneck at the heart of modern AI—that urgently requires novel solutions. We believe Brain-CA's technology presents serious answers to serious challenges." Jon Phillips, First Trust Capital Partners.

Silicon Catalyst has developed an unparalleled support ecosystem for its semiconductor start-ups, providing a strong network of Strategic Partners, technical and business advisors, investors and industry professionals who help companies launch and scale in the market. In addition, the accelerator’s In-Kind Partners provide privileged access to services, expertise, and intellectual property that can help commercialize their companies’ technological innovation during their 24-month term in the accelerator.

"By enabling a dramatic reduction in the power consumption of AI compute, Brain-CA and its innovative architecture are poised to disrupt the evolution of artificial intelligence. We are impressed with the company's vision and progress. Silicon Catalyst is thrilled to welcome Brain-CA into our accelerator program and bring to bear our comprehensive ecosystem of advisors, Strategic and In-Kind Partners, and investors to speed their journey to deliver Estimator-based products." Nick Kepler, COO, Silicon Catalyst

Brain-CA Technical Overview

Power is the defining constraint of the AI era. Today's AI silicon, built on transformer architectures that demand massive parallelism, large memory footprints, and continuous high-wattage operation, cannot scale to the intelligent endpoint without running into hard limits of heat, battery life, and infrastructure cost. Brain-CA's architecture was designed from first principles to break through that wall. At its core is the Brain-CA Estimator™, a simple hardware primitive that learns and predicts using only bit-level operations, with no multiplication and no external memory. Each Estimator runs the company's proprietary Cincinnati Algorithm™, a learning and inference procedure with exact, provable statistical structure.

"AI's biggest constraint is no longer software — it's the power and heat ceiling of the silicon underneath it. Our architecture was designed from first principles to break through that ceiling, and this seed round gives us the capital to execute against that thesis. We're going to use it to redefine what AI processing looks like at the endpoint." Steve Brunker, CEO, Brain-CA Technologies

Tiled by the thousands into a self-organizing fabric, these cells are designed to deliver exceptional energy efficiency, on-device adaptive learning, and scalability across healthcare, finance, manufacturing, transportation, and embedded endpoint applications, without the thermal and power overhead of conventional AI silicon. The company recently received its third patent, further protecting the core innovations underlying its approach. The company's proof-of-concept chip, fabricated at TSMC, is currently in packaging and testing.

Brain-CA at ISCA 2026

Brain-CA's technology is generating significant interest this week at ISCA 2026, widely recognized as the leading international conference for computer architecture research and innovation. The 53rd edition of the symposium is being held at the Raleigh Convention Center in Raleigh, NC, June 27 through July 1. Brain-CA was accepted to present across four workshops at the conference—MLArchSys, VisArch, CogArch, and HotInfra—showcasing its cellular automata-based architecture through live presentations, video sessions, and posters before the world's leading computer architecture researchers and engineers.

About Brain-CA Technologies

Brain-CA Technologies is a deep tech startup developing a novel AI processor architecture grounded in cellular automata and Bayes-like belief updating. At the heart of the architecture is the Brain-CA Estimator, a simple, self-contained hardware primitive that learns and predicts using only bit-level operations, guided by the company's proprietary Cincinnati Algorithm. Tiled by the thousands, these Estimators are designed to deliver exceptional energy efficiency, on-device adaptive learning, and scalability for intelligent endpoint applications. The company's architecture directly addresses critical challenges in AI processing: power consumption, heat generation, and the inability of current silicon to learn in real time at the endpoint. Brain-CA holds three issued patents protecting its core innovations. The company's technology is further detailed in the book, The Intelligence Shift: Brain-CA's First Principles Architecture for AI, authored by co-founder Jerry Felix and the Brain-CA team, available on Amazon. Headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, with operations in Sarasota, Florida, Brain-CA Technologies is driving the next wave of AI innovation. For more information, visit www.brain-ca.com.

About First Trust Capital Partners

First Trust Capital Partners, LLC ("FTCP") invests in early and growth-stage companies across multiple industries. With offices in Wheaton, Illinois and Franklin, Tennessee, FTCP is affiliated with First Trust Portfolios L.P. and First Trust Advisors L.P. (collectively, "First Trust"). Since its inception, FTCP has completed more than 100 private investments, partnering with founders and management teams building durable businesses. Further information at www.ftcapitalpartners.com