As I have said before, we are witnessing a renaissance of silicon. With the end of Moore’s Law, new semiconductors are required for a mobile-first, cloud-native, data-dominated, AI-powered, IoT world. Over our 50-year history of people-first investing, we have partnered with some legendary semiconductor entrepreneurs including Wilf Corrigan/LSI Logic, TJ Rodgers/Cypress, John Hennessy/MIPS, Eli Harari/SanDisk, Dado Banatao/S3 and more recently Pradeep Sindhu/Fungible.
Today, I’m thrilled to announce that we are co-leading the $53 million Series A financing in NUVIA Inc. which is building processors for data centers to take on Intel and AMD. Our co-investors include Dell Technologies Capital, Capricorn Investment Group and WRVI Capital.
NUVIA is founded by the dream team of Gerard Williams III, Manu Gulati, and John Bruno, three of Apple’s former top semiconductor executives in charge of iPhone chips. They collectively have driven silicon design and engineering on over 20 chips, with over 100 patents granted to date and have held a diverse array of leadership engineering roles at Google, Apple, ARM, Broadcom, AMD and ATI Technologies.
NUVIA was founded in early 2019, is developing a processor code-named Phoenix and currently has over 60 employees. NUVIA’s goal is to take the lessons learned by its founders in designing powerful chips for small, battery-powered devices such as iPhones and apply them to large, electricity hungry data center servers. The founders aim to make a chip that is faster, more power efficient and more secure than existing data center processors.
“We want to bring all these aspects that we have developed over time through our careers to this new market and really exploit them in this market, because it’s an area ripe for innovation and advancement,” Gerard Williams, CEO of NUVIA told Reuters in an interview.
Please join me in welcoming Gerard, Manu and John to the Mayfield family.
Originally published on LinkedIn.
