SiFive, a Silicon Valley startup, announced on Thursday that it has closed a $400 million funding round with Atreides Management, Nvidia, and other investors. The company aims to enter the growing market for central processing units for data centers.
This funding round values SiFive at $3.65 billion. CEO Patrick Little told Reuters that he expects this to be the company’s final funding round before going public, although he did not specify a timeline for this operation.
SiFive does not sell chips but offers architectures that customers like Google (Alphabet) can customize for their own internal chip designs. The intellectual property market has long been dominated by Arm Holdings, but Arm recently unveiled its own chips, becoming a potential competitor for many of its longtime customers.
According to Mr. Little, Arm’s new strategic direction has created an opportunity for SiFive to attract new customers. SiFive’s architectures are based on a new open standard called RISC-V, supervised by a non-profit foundation and not controlled by a single company, unlike Arm’s technology.
“There is some uncertainty about the ability of their usual suppliers to support them in the coming years,” Mr. Little said about SiFive’s customers. “Thanks to a decade of collaboration, they are now convinced that RISC-V has reached sufficient maturity to be a viable alternative.”
SiFive will use this $400 million to develop a central processing unit (CPU) architecture dedicated to data centers. This segment is booming: Arm introduced an offering last month, Nvidia entered the market, and Intel is facing such high demand that it is struggling to meet it.
“We have decided to target the most prestigious and demanding segment of data centers,” stated Mr. Little.
In addition to Atreides and Nvidia, this funding round includes investors such as Apollo, Point72, funds advised by T. Rowe Price Investment Management, as well as historic investors Prosperity 7 Ventures and Sutter Hill Ventures.
