Nvidia · TechCrunch AI
Nvidia-backed SiFive passes $3.65B valuation for open AI chips
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SiFive, a company founded in 2015 by the UC Berkeley engineers who created an open source chip design, has landed a $400 million oversubscribed round that values the company at $3.65 billion.
Key facts
- In fact, SiFive hasn’t raised since March 2022, PitchBook estimates, when it brought in $175 million led by Coatue Management at a pre-money valuation of $2.33 billion
- SiFive, a company founded in 2015 by the UC Berkeley engineers who created an open source chip design, has landed a $400 million oversubscribed round that values the company at $3.65 billion
- The round was led by Atreides Management, founded by former Fidelity investor bigwig Gavin Baker. (Atreides was also an investor in Cerebras Systems $1 billion round )
- In other words, as rivals Intel and AMD seek to compete with Nvidia’s GPU, Nvidia is backing an 11-year-old startup that can design CPUs on an open and completely alternate technology
Summary
Also, Nvidia was investor in this round, alongside a long list of VCs, private equity, and hedge funds. SiFive’s business model is like Arm’s was in years past — it licenses its chip designs to those who modify them for their own needs and does not sell the chips themselves. (In March, Arm changed its model when it launched the first-ever chip it manufactured, an AI chip, developed with Meta with customers including OpenAI, Cerebras, and Cloudflare.) SiFive stands in rarified air with chip designs that are open, not proprietary, as well as neutral, not reliant on specific customers. RISC-V has been, until recently, better known as a chip for smaller uses, like embedded systems.