Acrab's US$130M Series B Signals a Bet on Edge AI Infrastructure

As AI agents move from chatbots to always-on systems, the question of where they run is becoming as important as what they can do.

Most of today's AI runs in the cloud: a prompt goes out, a data centre processes it, an answer comes back. That model has carried the first wave of generative AI adoption, but it comes with trade-offs — latency, connectivity dependence, energy costs, and data that has to leave the device to be useful. For AI agents expected to operate continuously, in factories, hospitals, vehicles and homes, those trade-offs compound.

Acrab, a Singapore-headquartered company building agentic AI compute infrastructure, is betting that the next computing layer needs to sit closer to where data is created. The company has raised US$130 million in Series B financing, led by Vertex Ventures SEA & India and Vertex Growth, bringing its cumulative funding to over US$480 million.

Acrab's approach is full-stack: purpose-built silicon, edge AI systems and software orchestration, rather than a single point solution. Its first-generation GΞLIX 1 chip is designed to run large language models at the 100 billion parameter scale on local hardware. That chip powers Agent Box, the company's personal edge AI system, which supports on-device inference, persistent memory, multimodal interaction and agent orchestration — the ability for software agents to plan, use tools, retain context and act across a workflow, rather than simply answer a single question.

This positions Acrab at the intersection of several fast-moving markets: AI chips, personal AI devices, and enterprise edge systems, alongside established players and a growing set of AI infrastructure specialists. For Southeast Asia specifically, where connectivity and data conditions vary widely across markets, edge AI is not only a technical preference — it can determine whether AI systems function reliably outside of ideal, well-connected environments.

Vertex's perspective

Vertex Ventures SEA & India and Vertex Growth's continued backing of Acrab, across both its stealth-stage fundraising and this Series B, reflects a longer-term view of infrastructure investment: one where the payoff comes not from rapid commercial rollout, but from owning a foundational layer that AI agents will depend on as they move from experimental to everyday use.

The new funding will go towards product scaling, ecosystem expansion, and development of Acrab's next-generation computing platform. Acrab has said it sees "visible paths" to industrial deployments across multiple domains and expects to begin generating revenue within the year — a next phase that will test execution as much as it tested the case for raising this much capital ahead of broad commercial rollout.