SiFive raises $175m for RISC-V design as a double unicorn
SiFive has raised $175 million, valuing the leading RISC-V company as a ‘double unicorn’ of over $2.5 billion.
The Series F round was led by Coatue Management, a global technology investment firm that invests in companies at all stages – from venture to growth through public markets. This brings the total raised to $350m in six years.
SiFive is substantially accelerating the development of the company’s products, future roadmap and ecosystem around the RISC-V open source processor instruction set. This follows the announcement of the sale of its 300 strong OpenFive design subsidiary to Aphawave for $210m.
The funding will also be used to hire more staff. The company is currently looking to recruit in Cambridge after the announcement of nearly 1000 staff being laid off by competitor ARM.
- Chiplet opportunity prompts Alphawave to buy SiFive design business
- Arm to lay-off up to 1,000 workers
SiFive has design wins with more than 100 customers including several of the world’s largest hyperscale companies and 8 of the top 10 semiconductor companies, in applications ranging from automotive, AR/VR, client computing, data centre and intelligent edge.
“The market has spoken and made it abundantly clear that RISC-V computing will be competing for the heart of all future computing platforms. As the founder and market leader of RISC-V computing it’s our role to lead this ecosystem forward and offer customers advanced computing alternative to Arm and others,” said Patrick Little, CEO and Chairman of SiFive.
“This valuation is a validation of our strategy, our incredible team, and our singular focus on building the leading portfolio of high-performance RISC-V compute products in the market. Our customers are signaling strong demand for SiFive to deliver the highest level of performance as quickly as possible,” he said.
“We continue to be impressed by SiFive’s growth and challenge to proprietary legacy architecture IP providers,” said Jaimin Rangwalla, Senior Managing Director at Coatue Management. “SiFive’s accomplishments in high-performance RISC-V IP enables future computing platforms to be built on an open, industry-wide base, allowing technology companies to design differentiated products for their target markets. We are proud to partner with and support the team as they create an exciting future for the company.”
- Renesas partners with SiFive for RISC-V automotive solutions
- Intel offers $2bn for RISC-V pioneer SiFive says report
“Intel believes in enabling a multi-ISA strategy, including RISC-V as the open compute base for future platforms,” said Bob Brennan, VP & GM, Customer Solutions Engineering, Intel Foundry Services. “Our IFS investment in RISC-V includes partnering with RISC-V leader SiFive to build the Horse Creek developer platform that will be broadly available in late 2022, based on Intel 4 process technology.”
Coatue joins existing investors AMD (through Xilinx Ventures), Ibex Investors, Intel Capital, Osage University Partners, Prosperity7 ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Samsung Ventures, SK hynix, Spark Capital, Sutter Hill Ventures, and Western Digital Capital.
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