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Chip startup Rivos behind Apple lawsuit plans next move

TechBrunchBy TechBrunchApril 16, 20246 Mins Read
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Ribos made headlines in 2022 after Apple fired dozens of Apple engineers and filed a trade secret lawsuit accusing him of using confidential information to develop chips to rival the iPhone maker's own. It was done.

Mr. Ribos denies the allegations and countersues Apple for unfair competition. Apple ultimately settled the lawsuit in February. Around the same time, separate lawsuits with several Apple engineers hired by Mr. Ribos were also concluded.

Now, with the courtroom drama in the background, Rivos is redoubling its efforts to bring its chipset technology to market, CEO Puneet Kumar told TechCrunch.

“Rivos was founded with a mission to build industry-leading, power-efficient, high-performance chips,” said Kumar. “We are excited to target customers who are building data-driven solutions.”

A significant new funding tranche will help fund these efforts.

Rivos announced Tuesday that it has raised more than $250 million in an oversubscribed expanded Series A led by Matrix Capital Management, with participation from semiconductor giants including Intel (via its VC arm) and MediaTek. Other backers include Cambium Capital, Hotung Venture Group, Walden Catalyst, Dell Technologies Capital, and Koch Disruptive Technologies.

This is quite a turnaround for Rivos, which was founded in 2021 and struggled to raise investor funding and hire employees about a year ago in the shadow of the Apple lawsuit. In August, Livos laid off nearly 20 employees, or 6% of its workforce at the time, and was forced to postpone a planned $400 billion Series A funding round, the Information reported at the time.

custom server chip

Kumar said Rivos' long-term goal is to build chips primarily for servers that can handle intensive data analytics and AI workloads, including generative AI workloads.

“We are targeting customers building data-driven solutions, such as leveraging generative AI and data analytics to drive decision-making,” Kumar said. “There are many companies targeting such markets. Rivos supports the demanding hardware requirements of AI models and analytics that are reshaping enterprises.”

Rivos' first chipset is built on RISC-V, an open standard instruction set architecture (ISA).

The ISA is the underlying technical specification for every chip and describes how software controls the chip's hardware. For general purpose computing, chip design teams typically license their existing ISAs from established companies (such as Arm or Intel). However, RISC-V offers an open, royalty-free alternative.

Rivos' chips have what Kumar describes as “data-parallel accelerators” to speed up AI and big data-related computations, and are essentially designed for purposes beyond graphics processing. GPU. Manufactured using TSMC's 3nm manufacturing process. In chip manufacturing, “process” refers to the size of the smallest component that can be embedded on a chip.

Its 3nm is considered near the cutting edge. Qualcomm, MediaTek, Nvidia, AMD, and others are expected to use TSMC's process for future chip families, but Apple was the only company to use TSMC's process for its M3 chipset series in 2024.

In addition to building chips, Rivos is also working on developing self-contained data center hardware based on the Open Compute Project modular standard that effectively acts as a plug-and-play chip housing. Kumar said the company is creating a “firmware-to-app” software stack to program the chip.

“Customer workloads can easily be deployed on our more efficient hardware, while still using their existing models and databases for immediate benefits,” Kumar added.

Rivos currently plans to generate revenue by charging customers, primarily large data center operators, for its hardware and complementary software solutions. Early investor David Goel said Rivos' “low-friction” hiring pipeline is a key differentiator in the cutthroat chip market.

“The Rivos team has expertly integrated the revolutionary new RISC-V architecture and inventive accelerators to effectively realize this vision,” Goel told TechCrunch. “Their prototype chip serves as a convincing demonstration of their unique capabilities.”

But are they sufficiently differentiated?

fierce competition

Big tech companies, one of Rivos' potential customer segments, are racing to develop their own chips for AI and big data analytics as the generative AI boom continues.

Google is developing 5th generation TPUs and recently announced Axion, the first purpose-built chip to run the models. Amazon owns several custom chip families. Microsoft entered the fray last year with the Azure Maia AI Accelerator and Azure Cobalt 100 CPU. And Meta inches to its own design.

Meanwhile, dozens of startups are eyeing a piece of the custom data center chip market, which could reach $10 billion this year and double by 2025.

Groq, a company that develops chips that run AI models faster than traditional hardware, recently created a new business unit targeting enterprise applications and use cases. Tenstorrent, an AI hardware startup led by engineering luminary Jim Keller, is considering integrating its chipsets into data centers. And Rebellions, a South Korean fabless AI chip company, has raised hundreds of millions of dollars in capital to ramp up production of its data center-focused chip, Atom.

But Nvidia, currently the dominant force in the chip industry, is proving difficult to topple.

Nvidia briefly became a $2 trillion company this year, riding the demand for GPUs for AI training. Wells Fargo Equity Research said Nvidia has a 98% market share in data center GPUs and is building a new division to design bespoke chips for cloud computing companies and others. We estimate that our data center business grew by more than 400% in Q4 2023.

Things remain tough for some custom server chip startups, given the intensity of competition and the chilling effect Nvidia's dominance has had on funding for potential rivals.

Graphcore, which reportedly had its valuation reduced by $1 billion after its deal with Microsoft fell through, said a few months ago that it planned to cut jobs, citing an “extremely challenging” macroeconomic environment. Habana Labs, an AI chip company owned by Intel, laid off an estimated 10% of its workforce last year. Also last year, SiFive laid off 20% of its employees and discontinued its core product line, as did its RISC-V startup Rivos.

So, will Rivos work? perhaps.

Kumar would not discuss his customers, but said Rivos' chips are not expected to reach mass production until sometime next year. But Kumar said with 375 employees and hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank, Livos is well-positioned to expand manufacturing and double down on platform and software engineering. .

“The rapid changes in generative AI and its integration with data analytics stacks make it important that accelerators are easy to program and debug, and that data can move seamlessly between CPUs and accelerators,” Kumar said. I am. “Rivos addresses this need through a 'recompile, not redesign' approach.”



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