SiFive, a company that designs RISC-V processor technology, was founded in 2015 by Krste Asanović, Yunsup Lee, and Andrew Waterman. The company just raised $400 million in a Series G round. CEO Patrick Little said this will likely be their last fundraising round before an IPO, according to Reuters.
Atreides Management led the oversubscribed funding round, joined by Apollo Global Management, NVIDIA, Point72 Turion, and T. Rowe Price Investment Management. Existing investors Prosperity7 Ventures and Sutter Hill Ventures also took part. This round values SiFive at $3.65 billion, up from $2.5 billion in 2022.
SiFive uses an IP licensing model. The company designs RISC-V processor cores and licenses them to chipmakers, cloud providers, and semiconductor companies to use in their own chips.
Unlike ARM, which charges licensing fees and limits customisation, or x86, which is controlled by Intel and AMD, RISC-V lets customers add their own instructions, tune performance, and avoid being locked into a single vendor.
SiFive’s latest technology unifies scalar, vector, and matrix computing through a single standard interface. This matters for AI tasks, where different types of computation, such as regular processing, parallel vector work, and matrix math used in transformer models, need to run efficiently on a single chip.
In data centres, SiFive promotes its RISC-V CPU cores as the main control layer for agentic AI. These cores help manage different accelerators, direct complex tasks, and keep the system energy efficient.
SiFive plans to use the $400 million for three main goals: growing research and development in scalar, vector, and matrix computing; speeding up its data centre software ecosystem, including support for CUDA, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Ubuntu; and helping customers by adding support for NVIDIA’s NVLink Fusion interconnect.
This last private funding round signals to investors and the market that SiFive is preparing for an IPO. If SiFive goes public, it will be possible to compare it directly with Arm Holdings, which had its IPO in 2023. This would be the first time both architectures are compared in the public market.
