NUVIA was founded by three former Apple chip designers who led Apple's A-series chip efforts and is focused on bringing that energy-efficient design expertise to data-center processors. The company is developing two products: an SoC called Orion and a CPU core called Phoenix, and it previewed Phoenix's performance recently. NUVIA's thesis is that data-center chips are effectively limited to roughly 250–300 watts, so higher core counts require more efficient core designs to maintain performance and lower total cost of ownership. The company plans further product announcements and previews as it finalizes its technology. Financially, NUVIA previously raised a $53 million Series A and has just closed a $240 million Series B, giving it substantial runway to continue development. The company is also involved in ongoing litigation with Apple: CEO Gerald Williams III was sued by Apple for alleged poaching and has counter-sued; the case is in discovery. NUVIA is developing custom processors aimed at data-center and cloud workloads with an emphasis on energy efficiency to address rising power costs of machine-learning and computation-intensive processing. The company is operating stealthily and says it is building a "custom clean sheet designed from the ground up." It intends today to build on top of ARM's architecture while leaving options open for other architectures in the future. Founders John Bruno, Manu Gulati, and Gerard Williams III bring experience from Apple and Google, have worked on a combined 20 chips, and hold more than 100 patents. The startup had roughly 60 employees with about 30 accepted offers and expected to approach 100 employees by year-end. Financially, NUVIA has raised a $53M Series A and has "tens of millions of dollars" in the bank to fund product development.

Total raised

$293M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Series B

Latest activity

Sep 2020