By Stephen Nellis
SAN FRANCISCO, April 9 (Reuters) – Silicon Valley startup SiFive said on Thursday it has raised a $400 million round of funding from Atreides Management, Nvidia and others to enter the booming market for data-center central processor chips.
The round brings SiFive’s valuation to $3.65 billion, and CEO Patrick Little told Reuters he expects it to be the firm’s last round of funding before filing for a public offering, though he did not say when SiFive plans to do so.
SiFive does not sell chips but instead sells blueprints that customers such as Alphabet’s Google can customize for their own internal chip designs. That intellectual property business was for decades dominated by Arm Holdings, but Arm last month unveiled its own chips, making Arm for the first time a potential competitor to many of its longtime customers.
Little said that Arm’s new strategic direction opened an opportunity for SiFive to win over new customers. SiFive’s designs use a new open chip standard called RISC-V that is overseen by a nonprofit foundation and not controlled by any single company, the way that Arm’s chip technology is.
“There’s uncertainty about where their tried-and-true suppliers are going to be able to take them over the coming years,” Little said of SiFive’s customers. “And so all of them have become comfortable, because we’ve worked with them for a decade, that RISC-V has now matured to the point where it can be that option for them.”
SiFive will use the $400 million in funding to develop a design for a central processor unit for data centers. That market is heating up, with Arm introducing an offering last month, Nvidia entering the market and Intel seeing so much demand it could not keep up.
“We’ve decided that we’re going after the highest brass ring in the data center,” Little said.
In addition to Atreides and Nvidia, other investors in the round included Apollo, D1 Capital Partners, Point72, and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Investment Management, as well as previous investors Prosperity 7 Ventures, Capital Group and Sutter Hill Ventures.
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
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