- NUVIA announced it has closed $53 million in funding co-led by Capricorn, Dell Technologies Capital, Mayfield, and WRVI Capital.
NUVIA — a leading-edge silicon design company founded by John Bruno, P. Eng., Manu Gulati, and Gerard Williams III — announced it raised $53 million in Series A funding led co-led by Capricorn Investment Group, Dell Technologies Capital, Mayfield and WRVI Capital with additional participation from Nepenthe LLC.
The founders of the company have collectively driven system engineering and silicon design for more than 20 chips with more than 100 patents granted to date. They also bring a rich silicon design heritage with previous engineering leadership roles at Google, Apple, ARM, Broadcom, and AMD. And NUVIA has a goal of reimagining silicon design to deliver industry-leading performance and energy efficiency for the data center. Plus NUVIA is focused on building products that blend the best attributes of computing performance, power efficiency, and scalability.
Williams worked at Apple for 9 years and worked as the chief architect for Apple’s central processors and systems-on-a-chip. Gulati worked on Apple’s mobile systems-on-a-chip for 8 years. And Bruno spent 5 years working on Apple’s platform architecture group.
“The world is creating more data than it can process as we become increasingly dependent on high-speed information access, always-on rich media experiences and ubiquitous connectivity,” said Williams. “A step-function increase in compute performance and power efficiency is needed to feed these growing user needs. The timing couldn’t be better to create a new model for high-performance silicon design with the support of a world-class group of investors.”
The Capricorn Technology Impact Fund is known as a leading provider of venture capital for high-impact technology companies, which also an early investor inc opmanies like Tesla, QuantumScape, Planet Labs, SpaceX, and Saildrone.
“The compute-intensive demands of next-generation platforms are stretching the conventional limitations of the semiconductor industry,” added Dipender Saluja, Managing Partner of Capricorn’s Technology Impact Fund. “What’s needed is a new approach to silicon design that provides non-linear increases in performance and energy efficiency. We’re excited to partner with NUVIA on this journey as they realize this promise for the next era of semiconductors and computing.”
Dell Technologies Capital — which is the global investment practice for the Dell Technologies family of businesses (Dell, Dell EMC, Pivotal, RSA, SecureWorks, Virtustream, and VMware) — is an active investor in companies that are sustaining an investment pace of approximately $100 million a year.
“The formation of NUVIA is a prime example of remarkable innovation born in Silicon Valley. The best companies start when founders with outstanding track records of performance come together to identify a big problem and line up the best investment team to help them succeed. As part of that team, we’re focused on providing NUVIA with DTC’s unique value and market leverage,” explained Dell Technologies Capital president Scott Darling.
Mayfield invests primarily in early-stage companies and it has $1.8 billion in assets under management. Since launching 50 years ago, Mayfield has invested in more than 500 companies that resulted in 117 IPOs and over 200 M&A deals.
“We are witnessing a renaissance of silicon, as with the end of Moore’s Law, new semiconductors are required for a cloud-native, data-dominated, AI-powered IoT world,” commented Navin Chaddha, Managing Director of Mayfield. “It is an honor to partner with John, Manu, Gerard, and their team as they put silicon back into Silicon Valley.”
Even though NUVIA is entering a crowded space and will be competing against Qualcomm and Marvell, NUVIA has a lot of potential considering their backgrounds.
“I’ve been in and around semiconductor companies for 30 years. There are never any guarantees, but one thread that I’ve seen is that the most successful chip companies have rock star architects and developers,” said Moor Insights & Strategies analyst Patrick Moorhead in an interview with Reuters.
