Rain AI, a neuromorphic chip startup backed by OpenAI’s Sam Altman, has hired former Apple chip executive Jean-Didier Allegrucci as head of hardware engineering.

Allegrucci spent 17 years at Apple, having worked his way up from a senior manager of the company’s system-on-chip (SoC) engineering team to the role of senior director.

Rain AI said that in his new role, Allegrucci will “oversee the silicon and system efforts of Rain AI’s breakthrough energy-efficient hardware products,” helping the company’s customers to deploy AI technology.

“We could not be more excited to have a hardware leader of J-D’s caliber overseeing our silicon efforts,” said Rain AI CEO William Passo. “Our novel compute-in-memory technology will help unlock the true potential of today’s generative AI models, and get us one step closer to running the fastest, cheapest, and most advanced AI models anywhere.”

Founded in 2017 and headquartered in San Francisco, California, Rain AI is developing digital in-memory compute chips based on neuromorphic principles, with plans to start shipping its first chips in October 2024.

In December 2023, it was revealed that OpenAI signed a letter of intent in 2019 to spend $51 million on AI chips from the startup. Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, has personally invested more than $1 million into the company.

Altman is also the former leader of startup incubator Y Combinator, which is also a financial backer of Rain AI.