Chinese RISC-V startup RiVAI Technologies completed Series A financing

Editing by Greg Gao

RiVAI Technologies, a Chinese provider of RISC-V-based CPUs and customized AI SoC maker, recently completed Series A financing in tens of millions of dollars. The leading investors in this round are ByteDance and Hillhouse Capital.

RiVAI Technologies(睿思芯科) is headed by founder Tan Zhangxi (谭章熹), he holds a BS degree from Tsinghua University and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, with backgrounds in computer instruction set architecture (ISA). The company said this round of funds will be used to further expand the talent pool and carry out further R&D of high-end RISC-V chip products.

No exact amount of the new financing was given, and other investors include Lenovo Ventures, Wu Capital, Tsing Ventures, Zhen Fund, Northern Light Venture Capital, Baidu Ventures.

Established in August 2018 and headquartered in Shenzhen, RiVAI is backed by the tier-1 VCs in China like Northern Light(北极光创投), Baidu Ventures(百度风投). The company has attracted about 20 Silicon Valley industry veterans and Ph.D. holders to join the team and bring together expertise ranging from CPU ISA, SoC design, silicon-photonics, and AI algorithms.

Tan Zhangxi, founder of RiVAI, at 2021 World Artificial Intelligence Conference

RiVAI's main product is low-power, high-performance processors based on the RISC-V open-source instruction set, providing independent and controllable high-performance chips and SiP (System-in-Package) solutions, suitable for a variety of IoT/AIoT application scenarios such as wearable devices, smart homes, smart security, agriculture, and consumer electronics.

RiVAI is also one of the key members of RISC-V International Open Source Laboratory(RIOS Lab). The laboratory was founded by David Patterson, the pioneer of RISC-V and winner of the 2017 Turing Award, focusing on the RISC-V open-source instruction set CPU research. Patterson was the doctoral advisor of Tan Zhangxi before and is also RiVAI's technical advisor now.