Rivos hired dozens of Apple chip engineers — people who designed the M1 and A-series silicon — and then Apple sued them for trade secret theft in May 2022. The parties settled in December 2023. Rivos kept going. They are building RISC-V chips for data centers, with $250 million raised and a team that has more accumulated silicon design experience than most companies that have been shipping chips for decades. The lawsuit is behind them. The chip tape-out is still ahead. That gap is where everything will be decided.
Founded
2021
HQ
Santa Clara, California
Total Raised
$250 Million
Founder
Puneet Kumar, Mark Hayter
Status
Private
Website
rivosinc.comTHE ORIGIN STORY
A group of senior chip engineers from Apple — including people with deep experience on the M-series and A-series processor programs — quietly formed Rivos in 2021. They chose RISC-V as the instruction set architecture and targeted hyperscale data centers as the primary customer.
The premise: the people who designed the most efficient chips in the consumer market could apply the same architectural discipline to server-grade silicon built on an open standard. Apple filed suit in May 2022 alleging misappropriation of trade secrets.
The parties reached a confidential settlement in December 2023. Rivos continued hiring and raising capital throughout.
WHAT THEY ACTUALLY DO
Custom system-on-chip design for hyperscalers and cloud providers. Rivos aims to design and sell RISC-V based chips that outperform ARM-based server designs for specific data center workloads.
Revenue model is chip sales plus potential licensing arrangements with hyperscale customers who want in-house silicon development support.
THE PRODUCTS
RISC-V based server SoC (in development). Rivos has not shipped commercial silicon.
The product is a data center chip targeting cloud workloads with emphasis on performance-per-watt and open-architecture flexibility. First tape-out was anticipated in the 2024-2025 window.
HOW THEY GREW
Recruit elite chip talent — Rivos has pulled engineers from Apple, Arm, Google, and NVIDIA. Raise enough capital to fund a full tape-out cycle, which typically takes 3-5 years and hundreds of millions of dollars.
Target one or two hyperscaler design wins that validate the architecture. Build a defensible IP portfolio around RISC-V server implementations before incumbents fully commit to the space.
THE HARD PART
The Apple lawsuit created real uncertainty about which engineers could work on which problems and what prior work was off-limits. That uncertainty resolved with the settlement, but the design process had already lost time.
Beyond IP risk, getting a first chip to market that performs well enough to win against ARM Neoverse and Intel server designs — both of which have years of silicon maturity — is an enormous execution challenge.
MONEY TRAIL
Series A
2023 · Led by WRVI Capital
$250M raised
WHO BACKED THEM
WRVI Capital and Quiet Capital co-led the $250M Series A. Intel Capital, Mayfield, and other semiconductor-focused investors participated.
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Databricks
Databricks represents the hyperscale data processing workload that Rivos is designing its server SoC to serve — compute-intensive, performance-sensitive, and increasingly cost-aware.
Esperanto Technologies
Both Rivos and Esperanto are betting their companies on RISC-V as the open architecture that will displace ARM in the AI and data center chip market.
Head-to-Head
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