SiMa.ai raises $150m at a $1.45bn valuation for physical AI chips

SiMa.ai has raised $150m in a Series C round that values the company at $1.45bn, it announced on Monday. The San Jose startup makes chips and software that let robots, drones and cars run AI on the device itself.

Fidelity Management & Research Company and Amplify co-led the round. Alter Venture Partners, Dell Technologies Capital, Maverick Capital, +ND Capital, Point72 and StepStone Group also took part. AllianceBernstein, Baron Capital, J.P. Morgan and the State of Michigan joined as new investors.

The round takes SiMa.ai’s total funding to $500m. It was valued at $960m after an $85m Series B in July 2025, TechCrunch reported, citing PitchBook data.

A lower-power rival to Nvidia

SiMa.ai pitches its chips as a cheaper, lower-power option to Nvidia’s GPUs for what it calls physical AI: machines that sense and act in the real world. The company says its platform cuts deployment time from months to days or hours.

“While others are still figuring out the pieces or repurposing their cloud offerings, we’ve built the entire puzzle,” said Krishna Rangasayee, SiMa.ai’s founder and chief executive.

Rangasayee founded the company in 2018. He was previously chief operating officer of chipmaker Groq, TechCrunch reported.

What the money is for

The funding will scale Palette Neat, SiMa.ai’s agentic software environment for developers. It will also pay for new hardware due in the first half of 2028, which SiMa.ai says will deliver 1,000 dense TOPS of compute. TOPS, or trillions of operations per second, is a common measure of AI chip performance.

The new products will include machine learning IP, chiplets and systems-on-chip. SiMa.ai plans to target drones, humanoid robots, driver assistance systems and AI-powered car cockpits.

The company says its revenue growth quadrupled year on year between 2024 and 2025. It did not disclose revenue figures. Customers and partners include Bosch, Emerson, Micron, Synopsys and TRUMPF.

Chips for AI at the edge have drawn other deals this year. Analog Devices agreed to pay $1.35bn for edge AI chipmaker Alif, and NEURA and SECO plan to build robot compute modules in Europe.