South Korea-based venture capital firm The Invention Lab has completed a seed investment in Singapore artificial intelligence computing startup RIDM, backing a technology it says could ease a key performance bottleneck in AI and high-performance computing systems.
The Invention Lab said the round was made jointly with London-based quantitative investment firm Qube Research & Technologies (QRT), with the investors betting on RIDM’s “DODA” (Dynamically Orchestrated Dataflow Architecture), a computing design aimed at addressing the so-called “memory wall” problem, where data transfer between processors and memory limits overall system performance.
Financial terms were not disclosed.
RIDM, founded by engineers from the National University of Singapore (NUS), said its architecture targets memory constraints in AI and high-performance computing environments and is pursuing commercialisation based on three international patents.
The company is currently running a proof-of-concept with QRT, focusing on field-programmable gate array (FPGA) development and acceleration using DODA, a use case that prioritises ultra-low latency and high efficiency, according to the statement.
RIDM also said it has simplified “spatial compilation”, a long-standing challenge in mapping software efficiently onto parallel hardware, in linear time, and aims to offer developers a programming environment based on general-purpose languages such as C++, positioning it as an alternative to proprietary ecosystems such as Nvidia’s CUDA.
Founder and CEO Jin-ho Lee conducted doctoral research at NUS on general-purpose dataflow architecture, which was later patented by the university and exclusively licensed to the company.
Technical adviser Trevor E. Carlson, an associate professor at NUS and a developer of the multi-core simulator SniperSim, helped shape the technology’s foundations.
“RIDM is a next-generation technology team that is directly breaking through the limitations of traditional computing structures,” said Jin-young Kim, chief executive of The Invention Lab, describing the investment as both a technology bet and a vote of confidence in the team’s execution.
RIDM said it will maintain a lean structure focused on intellectual property and seek strategic partnerships with global companies once its technology validation is completed.
The investment reflects growing investor interest in next-generation computing architectures as demand for AI infrastructure accelerates globally.
While much of the current ecosystem is dominated by GPU-based platforms, rising costs, power constraints and supply bottlenecks are driving interest in alternative approaches that improve efficiency at the system level.
