SiFive Lands $400M Oversubscribed Funding Round At $3.65B Valuation, With Nvidia As A Backer

SiFive, the semiconductor startup founded in 2015 by the UC Berkeley engineering team that created the pioneering open-source RISC-V chip design, has closed a $400 million oversubscribed funding round that pushes the company’s post-money valuation to $3.65 billion.

This new financing round stands out for a handful of key reasons. For one, SiFive’s open RISC-V chip architecture is built on the RISC processor framework, rather than Intel’s x86 or Arm’s proprietary design—the two dominant CPU categories that currently power most systems in Nvidia’s sprawling GPU-based artificial intelligence empire.

Notably, Nvidia itself joined this funding round as an investor, alongside a long roster of venture capital firms, private equity groups, and hedge funds. The round was led by Atreides Management, the investment firm founded by high-profile former Fidelity portfolio manager Gavin Baker. (Atreides was also an investor in Cerebras Systems’ $1 billion funding round.) Other backers in the latest round include Apollo Global Management, D1 Capital Partners, Point72 Turion, T. Rowe Price, and Sutter Hill Ventures, among other firms.

SiFive runs on a business model that matches Arm’s historical approach: it licenses its chip blueprints to third parties, who can customize the designs for their own specific use cases, and does not manufacture or sell finished chips directly. This differs from a major shift Arm made this past March, when the company launched its first ever in-house produced chip: an AI processor developed in partnership with Meta, with early customers including OpenAI, Cerebras, and Cloudflare.

SiFive occupies a rare, unique position in the chip industry: its designs are open rather than proprietary, and neutral rather than tied to the priorities of any single major customer. Per PitchBook estimates, SiFive had not raised new external capital since March 2022, when it brought in $175 million in a round led by Coatue Management at a pre-money valuation of $2.33 billion. Intel Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, and Aramco Ventures counted among the backers of that earlier funding round.

Until recently, RISC-V architecture was best known for powering small-scale use cases like embedded systems. But armed with this new cash infusion and Nvidia’s backing, SiFive is now expanding into developing CPU designs for AI data centers. SiFive’s upcoming blueprints will be compatible with Nvidia’s CUDA software ecosystem and NVLink Fusion, the company’s rack-scale server system that lets disparate CPUs integrate seamlessly into Nvidia’s end-to-end “AI factory” infrastructure.

Put another way: as rivals Intel and AMD race to challenge Nvidia’s dominance in the AI GPU market, Nvidia is throwing its support behind an 11-year-old startup that builds CPUs on a fully open, entirely independent alternative chip technology.