New Electronics – Rivos raises $250m targeting data analytics and Gen-AI markets
Matrix Capital Management, the largest investor in this round, has joined the Board. The funding also saw new investors including Intel Capital, MediaTek, Cambium Capital, CIDC, Capital TEN, and Hotung Venture Group, and increased participation from existing investors Walden Catalyst, Dell Technologies Capital, Koch Disruptive Technologies, and VentureTech Alliance.
According to the company, the funding will enable it to tape-out its first silicon product and to meet increasing customer demand by expansion of manufacturing operations, platform hardware, software engineering, and support functions.
“The rapid changes in LLMs and the merger with the data analytics stack makes it vital that accelerators be easy to program and debug, and that data can seamlessly move between CPU and accelerator. Rivos addresses this need through our recompile-not-redesign approach,” said Puneet Kumar, co-founder and CEO of Rivos. “I’m grateful for Matrix’s vote of confidence in this approach and pleased to welcome Romit to the Board.”
Rivos provides power optimised chips combining high performance server-class RISC-V CPUs and a Data Parallel Accelerator (a GPGPU optimised for large language models (LLMs) and data analytics) that work with today’s software programming models and rack server constraints.
The tight integration of CPU and parallel computation sharing a uniform memory across DDR DRAM and HBM makes these devices suitable for today’s models and databases that need terabytes of memory.
Rivos is one of the leaders of the RISC-V open ecosystem. Calista Redmond, CEO of RISC-V International, commented, “Rivos quickly became an active participant in the community. The depth of experience from the Rivos engineers has enabled RISC-V to leap ahead in ISA, system and security specifications.”
On the software side Rivos was an instigator of the RISC-V Software Ecosystem (RISE) initiative.
“Expanding the application of data analytics and large language models to encompass not just traditional data types such as text, images, and video, but also genomic and medical data, unlocks unprecedented opportunities for innovation in research and treatment,” remarked David Goel, Managing General Partner of Matrix Capital Management. “The Rivos team has adeptly integrated the groundbreaking new RISC-V architecture with an inventive accelerator, effectively bringing this vision to life. Their prototype chip serves as a compelling demonstration of their unique capability to leverage the advanced TSMC 3nm process node – a feat few startups have managed to achieve.”
