SiMa.ai, a San Jose, California-based startup that builds chips for running artificial intelligence directly on robots, drones and cameras, said Monday it raised $150 million in a Series C round that values the company at $1.45 billion. The round was co-led by Fidelity Management & Research Company and venture firm Amplify, and brings SiMa.ai's total funding to more than $500 million since its founding in 2018.
The round drew participation from existing backers including Alter Venture Partners, Dell Technologies Capital, Maverick Capital, +ND Capital, Point72 and StepStone Group, along with new investors AllianceBernstein, Baron Capital, J.P. Morgan and the State of Michigan. The valuation marks a sharp jump from the roughly $960 million SiMa.ai was worth after its Series B round in July of last year.
SiMa.ai was founded by Krishna Rangasayee, who previously served as chief operating officer at chipmaker Groq. The company makes energy-efficient chips designed to process AI workloads on-device rather than sending data to the cloud, a category the industry increasingly calls "physical AI." The pitch to customers is lower latency and lower cost than relying on Nvidia's general-purpose GPUs for edge applications such as humanoid robots, autonomous vehicles and industrial cameras.
The company said the new capital will fund development of next-generation silicon targeting 1,000 dense TOPS (trillions of operations per second) of compute in purpose-built physical-AI chips, due in the first half of 2028, as well as scaling of Palette Neat, which SiMa.ai describes as the industry's first agentic software environment built for physical AI.
The deal is the latest sign of investor appetite for AI hardware that operates outside the data center. A projection from Counterpoint Research cited by the company estimates cumulative shipments of physical-AI devices, spanning robotics, automotive and drones, will reach 145 million units by 2035, a market SiMa.ai is betting will need chips purpose-built for constrained power and latency budgets rather than repurposed cloud GPUs. The round adds SiMa.ai to a small group of edge-AI chip startups, including Groq itself, that have drawn billion-dollar valuations this year as venture investors chase alternatives to Nvidia's dominance in AI compute.
