Rivos secures $250 million in funding to advance development of its AI-focused RISC-V chip

As artificial intelligence and generative AI gain ground, penetrating all sectors, the chips behind this technology must meet the – ever higher – performance criteria of companies. And if few players can respond, that doesn't stop start-ups from wanting to grab a share of the market. Based in Santa Clara, the young company Rivos launched in 2021 by Puneet Kumar (current CEO), Mark Hayter (CSO) and Belli Kuttanna (CTO) is one of them.

To ensure its development, it has just raised around $250 million in series A-3 from Matrix Capital Management, the majority investor in this round. This round attracted new equity entrants including Intel Capital, MediaTek, Cambium Capital, CIDC, Capital TEN and Hotung Venture Group, alongside existing investors Walden Catalyst, Dell Technologies Capital, Koch Disruptive Technologies and VentureTech Alliance.

Pushing the marketing of its first processor

Drawing on this funding, the Californian start-up plans to market its first silicon product and meet growing customer demand by developing the software stack and related support functions. The chips developed by Rivos – whose name comes from RISC-V and Open Source – are currently still in the prototype stage.

They combine high-performance RISC-V processors – which are an open source alternative to architectures created by Arm, Intel and AMD – and a data parallel accelerator (a GPGPU optimized for large language models and data analysis) that share a common memory domain across DDR and HBM memory. The Californian startup indicates that its chip will also be capable of supporting workloads requiring terabytes of memory.

Responding to the continued evolution of LLMs

“The rapid evolution of LLMs and merging with the data analytics stack makes it vital that accelerators are easy to program and debug, and that data can be moved seamlessly between the CPU and the “Rivos accelerator meets this need thanks to its approach of recompilation and not redesign”, says Puneet Kumar, co-founder and CEO of Rivos.

Let us also point out that the processor will be based on 3nm engraving signed TSMC, the same as that used for the processors present in Apple products. By comparison, Meta recently presented a second version of its MTIA processor dedicated to AI built on 5nm engraving.

No production schedule on the horizon, but ambitions

Although no production schedule has been given, it seems that the start-up is ready to make a place for itself in a market largely conquered by players such as Nvidia – with its Blackwell architecture – or Intel – with its Gaudi 3 accelerators.

To stand out, the start-up even boasts impressive performance “in terms of time to information and energy efficiency for reduced output/watt, throughput and total cost of ownership”. Points that should be checked when it is released.

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