SiMa.ai Technologies Inc. announced on September 28 that it raised $150 million in Series C funding at a $1.45 billion valuation. The custom-chip startup plans to use the capital to expand its development environment and build the next generation of its embedded AI computing platform for robots, drones and vehicles.
Investors Back an Nvidia Alternative
Fidelity Management & Research Company and Amplify co-led the round. Existing investors Alter Venture Partners, Dell Technologies Capital and StepStone Group participated alongside new investors AllianceBernstein, Baron Capital and J.P. Morgan.
SiMa.ai is positioning its purpose-built silicon and supporting software as an alternative to Nvidia’s CUDA-based hardware for physical AI. The company argues that its approach can consume less power and shorten deployment from lengthy integration cycles to days or hours. Those performance and deployment assertions are company claims rather than results from independent testing cited by the report.
Funding Targets Software and Silicon
Part of the financing will go toward scaling Palette Neat, which SiMa.ai describes as an agentic development environment for physical AI. The company will also fund a new generation of Modalix, its system-on-chip platform intended for embedded robotics.
SiMa.ai is targeting 1,000 tera operations per second for the forthcoming hardware and aims to deliver it in the first half of 2028. That figure is a future performance target, not a specification for a currently available product.
Power Is Central to the Competition
The source compares SiMa.ai’s target with Nvidia robotics modules spanning different performance and power tiers. Nvidia’s Jetson AGX Thor series reaches 2,000 FP4 TOPS for demanding humanoid and autonomous systems, while the Jetson T2000 and T3000 are reported at about 400 and 865 TOPS for applications such as robotic arms and heavy delivery drones.
Raw TOPS figures do not by themselves establish equivalent real-world performance across different chips and workloads. SiMa.ai’s strategy instead emphasizes the combination of custom silicon, software integration and lower power consumption for battery-constrained machines.
Expansion Into Embedded Systems
The company says its next-generation platform is intended to extend its reach into medium- and high-end drones, humanoid robots, automotive advanced driver assistance systems and AI-powered vehicle cockpits. Its listed customers and partners include ARK Electronics, AverMedia Technologies, Bosch, Emerson Electric, Micron Technology and Synopsys.
AI-generated editorial illustration; not a documentary photograph.
Source: Physical AI custom chip startup SiMa.ai raises $150M at $1.45B valuation
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