Tendrils raises $30 million led by Benchmark to rebuild the CPU around thousands of parallel cores

Tendrils, a hardware startup, announced a $30 million round led by Benchmark in a November 10 blog post. The company wants to rebuild general purpose computing around a processor designed for parallel work.

Visionaries Club, the UK Sovereign AI Fund, FR8, Antimatter, Cloudberry VC, Conviction, Embassy Ventures and SV Angels also took part.

Tendrils says it is designing a processor with thousands of cores operating in parallel. Alongside the hardware, the company develops an open source programming language called Vine, intended for architectures designed around parallel execution.

The announcement does not give a chip delivery date, prices or benchmark results. The proposed core count describes the design goal rather than a measured speed advantage over existing processors.

For makers, the software side offers something concrete to examine now. Vine's public documentation describes it as experimental and links to examples, while its source code is available on GitHub. Developers can inspect the language and its tooling while the hardware effort continues. Whether that approach produces a useful processor remains a separate performance question.