Amidst the artificial intelligence boom and a growing number of California startups, Santa Clara’s Rivos has raised over US$250 million to advance its technology endeavours.
Rivos was established in 2021 and has multiple offices throughout the globe. Its chips are designed to support large language models and data analytics systems.
“The funding will enable the company to tapeout its first silicon product and to meet increasing customer demand by expansion of manufacturing operations, platform hardware, software engineering and support functions,” Rivos said Tuesday in a news release.
The startup’s chips use reduced instruction set computing (RISC-V) tech. This essentially helps a computer’s central processing unit execute tasks with a simplified set of instructions. It is an open-source instruction set architecture (ISA) platform managed by Switzerland’s standards development body RISC-V International.
Aside from those details, specifications of the company’s technology remain largely a secret.
“The depth of experience from the Rivos engineers has enabled RISC-V to leap ahead in ISA, system and security specifications,” Calista Redmond, chief executive of RISC-V International, said.
Financial firms that participated in the fundraising include Dell Technologies Capital, Intel Capital and the VentureTech Alliance.
Breaking: #Rivos, the #AIchip developer embroiled in a recent trade secret theft settlement with #Apple, secures a staggering $250M+ funding round led by #Matrix. Armed with RISC-V chips, Rivos gears up to challenge #Nvidia's dominance. pic.twitter.com/C40sRg0DXK
— PUPUWEB Blog (@cheinyeanlim) April 16, 2024
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Rivos sued by Apple in 2022
The tech giant Apple Inc (Nasdaq: AAPL) filed a suit against the tech startup two years ago. It accused Rivos of hiring several of its engineers and subsequently using confidential info from them to develop its chips.
Rivos did in fact hire more than 40 employees from Apple, including multiple high-ranking engineers, but denied the theft allegations.
The startup claimed that the iPhone developer “sought to punish Rivos and any Apple employees who may seek to work there since the moment Apple learned about the promising startup.”
However, the companies reached an agreement a couple months ago. It will see that Apple can examine Rivos’s systems and retrieve any confidential info it might find.
“Rivos will submit to a forensic examination of its systems to remove any confidential Apple information,” MacRumors said.
A January report from India’s market researcher The Brainy Insights indicated that the market for AI chips would be worth over US$350 billion more in 2032 than it is currently.
rowan@mugglehead.com
