SiFive, Inc., the founder of RISC-V computing, today announced it has raised $175 million in a Series F financing round, valuing the company at 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. SiFive is substantially accelerating the development of the company’s RISC-V products, future roadmap, and ecosystem to achieve the unlimited potential that RISC-V has for SiFive’s customers and partners.
Founded six years ago by the inventors of RISC-V, SiFive introduced the world to the open standard ISA and transformed the future of compute. Today, RISC-V is firmly established as one of the major global compute platforms, with adoption all around the world, as evidenced by recent industry announcements including the Intel $1B innovation fund, featuring a goal of catalyzing the RISC-V ecosystem. 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 center, 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, 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.”
“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.”
“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.”
To date, the company has raised over $350 million to fuel its trajectory to the top of the performance processor IP market. SiFive will use the funds to invest in global hiring, the acceleration of new product development, and the software ecosystem. 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.
