Meta has acquired Rivos, a Silicon Valley startup that set out to challenge incumbent chipmakers with RISC-V–based processors and later pivoted to AI acceleration. The acquisition marks the conclusion of a four-year journey that began in 2021 with backing from Walden Catalyst Ventures. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Rivos was founded by Puneet Kumar, Mark Hayter, Belli Kuttanna, and Tse-Yu Yeh, with guidance from Walden Catalyst’s Lip-Bu Tan, former CEO of Cadence. Tan envisioned RISC-V as an alternative to ARM’s royalty-based licensing model and helped assemble a founding team with experience at SiByte, PA Semi, Apple, Intel, and Google. The company launched with over 100 employees, early commitments from TSMC, and backing from Dell Capital Ventures and Matrix Capital Management.
The company faced challenges, including a 2023 trade secrets lawsuit filed by Apple after nearly 50 Apple engineers joined Rivos. The case was later settled, enabling Rivos to continue customer engagements. As AI workloads began to dominate the semiconductor landscape, Rivos shifted focus from general-purpose data analytics to AI acceleration, developing a 3.1 GHz processor and a CUDA-compatible software stack. The approach allowed customers to run existing AI workloads designed for NVIDIA GPUs on RISC-V hardware with minimal changes. By 2025, the company had attracted strong investor interest but accepted Meta’s acquisition offer as a strategic outcome.
• Founded in 2021 with Walden Catalyst Ventures as anchor investor
• Focused on RISC-V as a royalty-free alternative to ARM architecture
• Faced 2023 lawsuit from Apple over alleged SoC trade secrets, later settled
• Pivoted to AI acceleration with 3.1 GHz processor and CUDA-compatible stack
• Chose Meta acquisition in 2025 over a new financing round
“Lip-Bu, our Chairman, has been instrumental in the very creation and success of Rivos… Most importantly, his vision guided us to pivot toward Generative AI, a move that defined our trajectory,” said Puneet Kumar, Co-founder & CEO of Rivos.
🌐 Analysis: The acquisition highlights Meta’s growing interest in custom silicon for AI workloads, a strategy already pursued by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. By integrating Rivos’ RISC-V and GPU-compatible platform, Meta gains a pathway to reduce reliance on NVIDIA GPUs while exploring alternatives in open instruction set architectures. The move also strengthens the position of RISC-V in data center compute, an area where adoption has been slower compared to embedded and edge markets.
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