SK Hynix, the memory chip-focused subsidiary of conglomerate SK Group, led a $61m series E round for US-based custom semiconductor producer SiFive yesterday.
Mobile chipmaker Qualcomm, data storage technology manufacturer Western Digital and semiconductor and data technology provider Intel also took part, through Qualcomm Ventures, Western Digital Capital and Intel Capital respectively.
The round was filled out by including spinout-focused investment firm Osage University Partners (OUP), investment consulting firm Prosperity7 Ventures and venture capital firms Sutter Hill Ventures and Spark Capital.
SiFive operates a cloud-based platform that enables clients to design purpose-built semiconductors using the Risc-V instruction set architecture, its version of the mechanism responsible for outputting computer processing instructions.
Risc-V was developed by SiFive’s founding team at University of California, Berkeley and is open source and free to use.
The series E funding will be used to bring new products to market for clients in the aerospace, automotive, artificial intelligence, data centre, mobile, network and data storage sectors.
The company has now raised more than $186m since it was founded in 2015, including $65.4m in a June 2019 series D round featuring Qualcomm Ventures, wearable biometric device producer Huami, OUP, Sutter Hill Ventures, Spark Capital and Chengwei Capital.
Existing investors OUP, Sutter Hill and Spark Capital had co-led a $50.6m series C round for SiFive the previous year that included Intel Capital, Huami, Western Digital and SK Telecom, the telecommunications arm of SK Group.
The original version of this article appeared on our sister site, Global University Venturing.