SiFive lands $400M Series G as it eyes an IPO
SiFive, the RISC-V processor IP company founded in 2015 by Krste Asanović, Yunsup Lee, and Andrew Waterman, has raised $400 million in a Series G funding round that it expects to be its final private raise ahead of a public listing.
CEO Patrick Little said the round will “likely” be the company’s last before an IPO, according to Reuters. The financing was led by Atreides Management and was described as oversubscribed. New and returning backers included Apollo Global Management, NVIDIA, Point72 Turion, T. Rowe Price Investment Management, Prosperity7 Ventures, and Sutter Hill Ventures.
The round values SiFive at $3.65 billion, up from $2.5 billion in 2022, underscoring renewed investor interest in semiconductor infrastructure tied to AI workloads.
Why RISC-V matters
SiFive operates an IP licensing model, designing RISC-V CPU cores and licensing them to chipmakers, cloud providers, and semiconductor companies. Unlike Arm’s licensing approach or the x86 ecosystem dominated by Intel and AMD, RISC-V is positioned as a more customizable architecture that can reduce vendor lock-in by allowing customers to add instructions and tune performance.
The company said its latest technology aims to unify scalar, vector, and matrix computing under a single standard interface—capabilities increasingly important for AI systems that must efficiently run mixed workloads, including matrix-heavy transformer operations.
Where the money goes
SiFive plans to deploy the $400 million toward expanding R&D across scalar, vector, and matrix computing; accelerating its data center software ecosystem with support for CUDA, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Ubuntu; and adding customer support for NVIDIA’s NVLink Fusion interconnect.
If SiFive proceeds with an IPO, investors would be able to compare a pure-play RISC-V business directly with publicly traded Arm Holdings, which returned to the market in 2023.
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