Ventana Micro Systems emerged from stealth mode after raising $53mn

Ventana Micro Systems, a company developing high-performance data centre class RISC-V processors, has raised $38 million in its Series B funding round.

The round was led by Dr. Sehat Sutardja and Weili Dai (founders of Marvell Technology Group) and other leading Semiconductor investors in partnership with Series A investors, which include a notable strategic partner, bringing Ventana’s total funding to $53mn.

Founded in 2018, Ventana offers data centre class high-performance RISC-V CPUs with extensible instruction set capability delivered in the form of multi-core chiplets. The company also offers a customisable SoC chiplet enabling hyperscalers and others to achieve rapid productization while still being able to innovate and differentiate.

The company’s compute chiplets are designed to deliver single thread performance optimised for cloud, enterprise data centre, 5G, edge compute and automotive applications. According to Ventana, its microarchitectural innovations make its design highly portable across different fabs and process nodes.

“Nearly half of compute spend is moving away from general purpose processors in favour of infrastructure compute and domain specific accelerators,” said Balaji Baktha, Founder and CEO of Ventana. “Ventana is perfectly positioned to capitalize on this trend with our high-performance cores built on the extensible RISC-V architecture, and our chiplet-based rapid productization approach.”

Ventana’s modular, scalable chiplet-based product strategy is seen as suppoting a significant reduction in development time and cost compared to the prevailing IP model.

While its compute chiplets maximize performance by targeting cutting edge process geometries, customers can implement their own SoC chiplet silicon in the most optimal process node for the target application.

To ensure interoperability, Ventana offers a parallel die-to-die (D2D) solution capable of very low latencies, high bandwidth and lowest power. The D2D solution is compliant with the OCP Open Domain-Specific Architecture (ODSA) physical interface standard.