The SW story is a train wreck, though. The problem basically was that they couldn’t hire any good SW people. As I said I know the founders. They are both genuinely decent guys, they put their own money in so they have some (well, minimal) skin in the game, and they know a ton of expert-level embedded and systems coders with between 20 and 40 years of hard core experience. As far as I can tell, they weren't really able to get anyone that we know in common to join. I certainly did not, and no one I know did either. Last I heard they'd had to hire third choice guys in Europe to do the work and it wasn't going well.
There's a pretty good reason for it, and it comes down to a sociological problem. HW people don’t value SW people. It's just basically true and has been true everywhere I've looked. Maybe if you're doing a system (like a router or maybe a drone) then the HW people will begrudgingly admit that the SW is a major part of the delivery, but that isn't true for chip companies (including chips-on-reference-boards).
You can rest assured that at a chip company, all of the high comp people in the company are going to be on the ASIC team and the SW team will never be on the same tier. The argument is always the same, no matter how many times it bites the companies on the ass and sends them careening into the dumpster: “yes, but the chip without SW is the chip! we can buy SW, if we have to. SW without the chip has zero value.”
Almost every chip company ends up like that, and the kind of low level, experienced SW people that work in the space know to avoid them and work at systems companies instead.
As far as I've been able to determine, with _maybe_ the exception of Cerebras - maybe - this is the situation that has played out at all of the 201x AI chip companies. They get founded by ASIC guys, most of whom have more than a small chip on their shoulder about the relative value of ASICs-vs-SW. These guys are all ex-SGI, ex-Sun, ex-Google, ex-Nvidia, ex-Intel HW guys who saw SW people making a lot more, not just in broader industry terms over the last few years, but at hardware-focused companies. In general, ASIC guys make less than SW guys unless they are the very narrow set of top level architects. IMHO from a value creation standpoint, that is _super unfair_ and I am not here to justify it, but it is how it is. The result poisons ASIC companies. SW people who know what needs to be don't won't go to them most of the time, for good reason, and so they fail.
So I will say, given that, starting with SW first is brilliant.