INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Silicon is apparently the new gold these days, or so VCs hope.What was once a no-go zone for venture investors, who feared the long
development lead times and high technical risk required for new entrants in the semiconductor field, has now turned into one of the hottest
investment areas for enterprise and data VCs
Startups like Graphcore have reached unicorn status (after its $200 million series D a year ago) while Groq closed $52M from the likes of
Chamath Palihapitiya of Social Capital fame and Cerebras raised $112 million in investment from Benchmark and others while announcing that
it had produced the first trillion transistor chip (and who I profiled a bit this summer).Today, we have another entrant with another great
technical team at the helm, this time with a Santa Clara, CA-based startup called NUVIA
The company announced this morning that it has raised a $53 million series A venture round co-led by Capricorn Investment Group, Dell
Technologies Capital (DTC), Mayfield, and WRVI Capital, with participation from Nepenthe LLC.Despite only getting started earlier this year,
the company currently has roughly 60 employees, 30 more at various stages of accepted offers, and the company may even crack 100 employees
There has been an explosion in data and by extension, the data centers required to store all of that information, just as we have
exponentially expanded our appetite for complex machine learning algorithms to crunch through all of those bits
Companies like Intel are hitting the limits of physics and our current know-how to continue to improve computational densities, opening the
halves to the NUVIA story
The three overlapped for a number of years at Apple, where they brought their diverse chip skillsets together to lead a variety of
According to a press statement from the company, the founders have worked on a combined 20 chips across their careers and have received more
than 100 patents for their work in silicon.Gulati joined Apple in 2009 as a micro architect (or SoC architect) after a career at Broadcom,
and a few months later, Williams joined the team as well
strategically about what the chipset of the iPhone and iPad should deliver to end users
The two eventually left Google earlier this year in a report first covered by The Information in May
For his part, Williams stayed at Apple for nearly a decade before leaving earlier this year in March.The company is being stealthy about
exactly what it is working on, which is typical in the silicon space because it can take years to design, manufacture, and get a product
data center broadly conceived (i.e
cloud computing), and specifically reading between the lines, to finding more energy-efficient ways that can combat the rising climate cost
encumbered by legacy designs
founders, the other half of this NUVIA story is the collective of investors sitting around the table, all of whom not only have deep
technical backgrounds, but also deep pockets who can handle the technical risk that comes with new silicon startups.Capricorn specifically
invested out of what it calls its Technology Impact Fund, which focuses on funding startups that use technology to make a positive impact on
Its portfolio according to a statement includes Tesla, Planet Labs, and Helion Energy.Meanwhile, DTC is the venture wing of Dell
Navin Chaddha, an electrical engineer by training who leads Mayfield, has invested in companies like HashiCorp, Akamai, and SolarCity
Finally, WRVI has a long background in enterprise and semiconductor companies.I chatted a bit with Darling of DTC about what he saw in this
particular team and their vision for the data center
In addition to liking each founder individually, Darling felt the team as a whole was just very strong
confirmed that the company is broadly working on data center products, but said the company is going to lie low on its specific strategy
during product development
at Google and Apple, it seems evident that the extreme energy-to-performance constraints of mobile might find some use in the data center,
particularly given the heightened concerns about power consumption and climate change among data center owners.DTC has been a frequent
investor in next-generation silicon, including joining the series A investment of Graphcore back in 2016
I asked Darling whether the firm was investing aggressively in the space or sort of taking a wait-and-see attitude, and he explained that
the firm tries to keep a consistent volume of investments at the silicon level
have to be carefully made with the intention of supporting the companies for the long haul.That explanation was echoed by Gulati when I
asked how he and his co-founders came to closing on this investor syndicate
Given the reputations of the three, they would have had easy access to any VC in the Valley
Actually capitalizing upon it and then building a team and executing on it is not something that just anybody could possibly take on
And similarly, it is not something that every investor could just possibly take on in my opinion
They themselves need to have a vision on their side and not just believe our story
And they need to strategically be willing to help and put in the money and be there for the long haul.It may be a long haul, but Gulati
year and tens of millions of dollars already in the bank, they have their war chest and their army ready to go
Now comes the fun (and hard) part as we learn how the chips fall.Update: Changed the text to reflect that NUVIA is intending to build on top
