SiFive hits $3.65B valuation

SiFive said on April 9 it raised $400 million in an oversubscribed Series G round, lifting its valuation to $3.65 billion. (sifive.com) Atreides Management led the round, with Apollo Global Management, Nvidia, Point72 Turion, T. Rowe Price Investment Management, Prosperity7 Ventures, and Sutter Hill Ventures also participating, SiFive said. The company said the money will fund its high-performance data center roadmap. (sifive.com) SiFive sells processor intellectual property, not finished chips. Its April 9 announcement said the new capital will push its central processing unit and artificial intelligence intellectual property deeper into data center and artificial intelligence infrastructure markets. (businesswire.com) RISC-V is the basic instruction language a processor follows, like a rulebook for what commands a chip can understand. RISC-V International describes it as an open standard instruction set architecture, meaning companies can build on the standard without relying on a single owner’s licensing model. (riscv.org) That sets it apart from Arm, which licenses its technology to chip companies, and from x86, the processor architecture long associated with Intel and Advanced Micro Devices in personal computers and servers. Arm says its business is built around technology licensing, while Intel says x86 became the foundation of personal computing. (arm.com) (newsroom.intel.com) SiFive is betting that data center customers want another option as artificial intelligence systems drive demand for more central processing power alongside graphics processors. In its funding announcement, the company said “agentic AI workloads” are driving outsized demand for central processing unit intellectual property. (sifive.com) The company has been building that pitch for months. In September 2025, SiFive introduced its second-generation Intelligence family, saying the lineup combined scalar, vector, and matrix compute to handle artificial intelligence workloads from edge devices to the data center. (sifive.com) SiFive traces its roots to the University of California, Berkeley, where RISC-V started as a 2010 research project. RISC-V International says co-creator Krste Asanović co-founded SiFive in 2015 with Yunsup Lee and Andrew Waterman to commercialize the architecture. (people.eecs.berkeley.edu) (riscv.org) The company is now trying to turn that academic-origin architecture into a larger share of the server market, where Arm has expanded and x86 still dominates. This round gives SiFive more cash to make that case with data center customers and chip partners. (sifive.com) (arm.com)