Rivos made headlines in 2022 after Apple filed a trade secrets suit against it, which accused Rivos of hiring away dozens of Apple engineers and using confidential info to develop chips to rival the iPhone maker’s own.
The corporate denied the allegations and countersued Apple for unfair competition. Apple ended up settling its lawsuit in February. Around the identical time, it ended separate litigation with several of the Apple engineers Rivos had hired.
Now, with the courtroom drama behind it, Rivos is redoubling its efforts to bring its chipset tech to market, CEO Puneet Kumar told TechCrunch.
“Rivos was founded with the mission of constructing industry-leading, power-efficient, high-performance chips,” Kumar said. “We’re excited to be targeting customers who’re constructing data-driven solutions.”
A considerable recent funding tranche will help to finance those efforts.
On Tuesday, Rivos announced that it raised over $250 million in an oversubscribed, prolonged Series A led by Matrix Capital Management with participation from chip giants, including Intel (via its corporate VC division) and MediaTek. Other backers included Cambium Capital, Hotung Enterprise Group, Walden Catalyst, Dell Technologies Capital and Koch Disruptive Technologies.
It’s quite the turnaround for Rivos, which was founded in 2021 and roughly a 12 months ago was struggling to lift funds from investors and recruit employees under the shadow of the Apple suit. In August, Rivos laid off nearly two dozen employees, or 6% of its workforce on the time, and was forced to delay a planned $400 billion Series A fundraising round, The Information reported on the time.
A custom server chip
The long-term goal with Rivos, Kumar said, is to construct chips primarily for servers that may handle intensive data analytics and AI workloads, including generative AI workloads.
“We’re targeting customers constructing data-driven solutions (e.g., those utilizing generative AI and data analytics to drive decisions),” Kumar said. “There’re many corporations targeting such markets; Rivos supports the extraordinary hardware requirements of the AI models and analytics that can remake the enterprise.”
Rivos’ first chipset is built on RISC-V, the open standard instruction set architecture (ISA).
ISAs are a technical spec at the inspiration of each chip, describing how software controls the chip’s hardware. For general-purpose computing, chip design teams typically license an existing ISA from an incumbent (e.g., Arm or Intel). But RISC-V presents an open, no-royalties-attached alternative.
Rivos’ chip features what Kumar describes as a “data parallel accelerator” to hurry up AI- and massive data–related computations, essentially a GPU designed for purposes beyond graphics processing. It was made using TSMC’s 3nm fabrication process. In chip manufacturing, “process” refers to the dimensions of the smallest component that might be embedded on a chip.
That 3nm is taken into account near the leading edge. While Qualcomm, MediaTek, Nvidia and AMD amongst others are expected to employ TSMC’s process for his or her upcoming chip families, Apple was the one company to make use of it in 2024 in its M3 chipset series.
Along with constructing the chip, Rivos is working on self-contained data center hardware based on the Open Compute Project modular standard, which can effectively function plug-and-play chip housing. And it’s making a “firmware-to-app” software stack for programming the chip, Kumar said.
“Customer workloads might be easily deployed on our more efficient hardware, but still using their existing models and databases, giving them a direct profit,” Kumar added.
Rivos, which is pre-revenue in the meanwhile, plans to earn a living by charging customers — chiefly large data center operators — for its hardware and complementary software solutions. David Goel, an early investor, said that Rivos’ “low-friction” adoption pipeline is a key differentiator within the cutthroat chip market.
“The Rivos team has adeptly integrated the groundbreaking recent RISC-V architecture with an inventive accelerator, effectively bringing this vision to life,” Goel told TechCrunch. “Their prototype chip serves as a compelling demonstration of their unique capability.”
But is it differentiating enough?
Stiff competition
Big Tech firms — one in every of Rivos’ potential customer segments — are racing to develop their very own in-house chips for AI and massive data analytics because the generative AI boom continues.
Google’s on its fifth-gen TPU and recently revealed Axion, its first dedicated chip for running models. Amazon has several custom chip families under its belt. Microsoft last 12 months jumped into the fray with the Azure Maia AI Accelerator and the Azure Cobalt 100 CPU. And Meta’s inching together with its own designs.
Meanwhile, startups by the handfuls are angling for a slice of a custom data center chip market that might reach $10 billion this 12 months and double by 2025.
Groq, an organization developing chips to run AI models faster than conventional hardware, recently formed a brand new business unit geared toward enterprise applications and use cases. AI hardware startup Tenstorrent, helmed by engineering luminary Jim Keller, is trying to construct its chipsets into data centers. And Rebellions, a South Korean fabless AI chip firm, has raised a whole lot of tens of millions of dollars in capital to ramp up production of its data center–focused chip, Atom.
But Nvidia, the dominant force in chips straight away, is proving to be a tricky one to topple.
Nvidia briefly became a $2 trillion company this 12 months, riding high on the demand for its GPUs for AI training. Wells Fargo Equity Research estimates that Nvidia has a 98% market share in data center GPUs, and the corporate’s data center business was up greater than 400% in Q4 2023 as Nvidia builds a brand new unit to design bespoke chips for cloud computing firms and others.
Given the fierceness of the competition — and the chilling effect Nvidia’s supremacy has had on funding for would-be rivals — it’s been rough going for some custom server chip upstarts.
Just a few months ago, Graphcore, which reportedly had its valuation slashed by $1 billion after a cope with Microsoft fell through, said that it was planning job cuts because of the “extremely difficult” macroeconomic environment. Habana Labs, the Intel-owned AI chip company, laid off an estimated 10% of its workforce last 12 months. Also last 12 months, SiFive — like Rivos, an RISC-V startup — let go of 20% of its workforce and discontinued its core product line.
So will Rivos fare higher? Perhaps.
Kumar wouldn’t speak about customers, and Rivos’ chip isn’t anticipated to achieve mass production until sometime next 12 months. But with 375 employees and a whole lot of tens of millions of dollars within the bank, Kumar said that Rivos is well-positioned to expand manufacturing and double down on platform and software engineering.
“The rapid changes in generative AI and the merger with the info analytics stack makes it vital that accelerators be easy to program and debug, and that data can seamlessly move between CPU and accelerator,” Kumar said. “Rivos addresses this need through our ‘recompile-not-redesign’ approach.”
