Tendrils has raised $30m in a round led by Benchmark to rebuild general-purpose computing.
Visionaries Club, the UK Sovereign AI Fund, FR8, Antimatter, Cloudberry VC, Conviction, Embassy Ventures and SV Angels also took significant part in the round.
Tendrils received additional support from all of its angel investors.
The company also welcomed Jack Altman (pictured) – general partner at Benchmark and former co-founder and CEO of Silicon Valley HR platform Lattice – as its newest board member.
Tendrils argues that contemporary CPUs are made under the constraint of backwards compatibility with sequential, single-core chips.
It said accumulated layers of historical designs lock engineers into decisions dating back to the 1970s.
In its view, all existing CPUs are bottlenecked by complex cache coherency protocols and elaborate reorder buffers.
Tendrils said it believes the future of general-purpose computing lies beyond legacy architectures for legacy software.
Instead of starting from a sequential design, the company said it is building its processor to have thousands of cores operating in parallel.
It said this requires moving beyond the notion of shared mutable memory and linear instruction sequences.
Tendrils is working in tandem on Vine, an open-source language which it said has been designed from the beginning to target a new wave of parallel-first architectures.