China's first artificial intelligence (AI) chip unicorn Cambricon is now valued at $2.5 billion after its B-round financing, the highest valuation among global smart chip startups, reports thepaper.cn.

The company was founded in 2016 by two brothers, Chen Yunji and Chen Tianshi, who are researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Cambricon released China's first AI chip, Cambricon-1A, in 2016. The chip, designed for devices such as smartphones, wearables and drones, is said to be the world's first commercialized neural network processor chip.

The startup raised $100 million in its A-round funding in August 2017, making it the first unicorn in the industry.

Cambricon unveiled China's first AI chip for cloud computing last month. The chip, called MLU100, has accurate and fast big data processing capacity, especially when it comes to image and voice searches, according to Xinhua News Agency.