Can Rivos Win Where Nvidia Is “Overkill”?

Rivos is asking for a lot of money before it has sold a single chip. The Santa Clara startup is reported to be seeking up to $400–500 million in new funding: a raise that would push its lifetime capital close to $900 million and value the business at north of $2 billion. That simple fact explains why this is a story worth watching: investors are being asked to back a product that exists today mostly on paper and in prototype form. There’s logic to the ask. Rivos designs inference hardware, the kind of compute used to run trained AI models in production, and the company argues there’s room for alternatives to Nvidia’s expensive top-tier cards. CEO Puneet Kumar has said Rivos will aim for “smaller installations where Nvidia might seem like an overkill from a cost perspective.”