Start-Up SiFive Secures $61 Million in Series E, Total at $190.5 Million

SiFive, Inc., provider of commercial RISC-V processor IP and silicon solutions, raised $61 million in a series E round led by SK hynix, Inc., joined by new investor Prosperity7 Ventures, with additional funding from existing investors Sutter Hill Ventures, Western Digital Capital, Qualcomm Ventures LLC, Intel Capital, Osage University Partners, and Spark Capital.

“Global demand for storage and memory in the data center is increasing as AI-powered business intelligence and data processing growth continues,” said Youjong Kang, VP of growth strategy, SK hynix. “SiFive is well-positioned to grow with opportunities created from data center, enterprise, storage and networking requirements for workload-focused processor IP.”

SiFive develops a range of processor cores, accelerators, and SoC IP to create domain-specific architecture that will enable efficient, high-performance computing solutions. It innovates by developing processor microarchitecture, SoC IP, and accelerator IP for use in workload-specific silicon. With this new investment, it will help leading semiconductor companies bring to market new products for aerospace, automotive, AI, data center, mobile, networking, and storage applications.

Its product portfolio of RISC-V-based microarchitectures are a choice to replace and augment legacy, general-purpose proprietary architectures in workload-focused designs.

Recently, SiFive announced the 20G1 update for Core IP, enabling significant enhancements for performance, power, area, and features, with pre-integrated Shield, for whole SoC security, and Insight advanced trace and debug capabilities.

“SiFive is well-positioned to capture the opportunity enabled by workload focused products,” said Aysar Tayeb, executive MD, Prosperity7 Ventures. “We’re pleased to be part of the global shift to workload-focused designs, and believe SiFive’s domain-specific architecture IP will fuel innovation and solutions for computing challenges we see today.“

Domain-specific architecture designs are further enabled by SiFive Custom Instruction Extensions (SCIE), permitting the inclusion of workload-focused IP through hardware and software optimization. Firm’s heterogeneous architecture allows the integration of mixed processor core designs in a coherent cluster for scale-out problems, leveraging SCIE to accelerate workload processing efficiently.

“We are very pleased by the new and renewed investment in the SiFive vision and mission,” said Dr. Naveed Sherwani, chairman, president, and CEO. “SiFive’s winning product portfolio will continue to expand and be adopted for solutions that require domain-specific architectures.”

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June 24, 2019 | Press Release