Rivos: Investing in the Future of Silicon

Early investing in silicon is not for the faint of heart. Bringing new silicon to market is intricately challenging. Still, it’s been a focus area for the Dell Tech Capital team for more than a decade for a reason. When a team gets it right, they can move an entire generation of technologies forward.

What drew us to investing in Rivos back in 2021 was, as is often the case, the strength in the team and their vision of bringing a new approach to the market.

The founding team including Puneet, Mark, and Belli is deeply technical and cross-disciplinary. They’ve led teams that have produced some of the most meaningful OS and silicon projects that have come out of Silicon Valley in the past two decades. They pitched us on a software-leading-chip-design approach that would leverage RISC-V ISA with a workload-specific accelerator. The goal would be to achieve a sweet spot between security, flexibility, efficiency, and performance.

The company’s first commercial product is designed to handle the demands of robust solutions taking advantage of large language models and powerful data analytics. Essentially, these are purpose-built data processing engines that are comprised of host CPUs with integrated GPGPUs. And, because they’re building on open and existing standards with RISC-V and in all other areas, industry adoption becomes easier and is much more attractive to the enterprise.

What’s continued to impress us at DTC over the past three years is this leadership team’s ability to attract top talent and partnership interest as it quietly builds the company and its technologies. The team’s technical accomplishments to date and milestones hit are their stories to tell. Suffice it to say, we’re bullish on the trajectory of this company.

Rivos’s vision and strategy made a lot of sense to us in 2021. The resolution has sharpened even more so now as companies rush to incorporate GenAI across apps and services everywhere. The greenfield for the company just keeps expanding. Today we celebrate Puneet and the team as they officially exit stealth with their funding announcement. We are looking forward to the path ahead for this exceptional team.

– Scott Darling