SiMa.ai Secures $150M Series C at $1.45B Valuation to Scale Physical AI Chip Development

Physical AI Chip Developer SiMa.ai Secures Major Series C Funding

SiMa.ai, a startup developing chips and software that enable robots, drones, cameras, and other devices to run AI directly on hardware, has raised $150 million in Series C funding at a $1.45 billion valuation1

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. The round was co-led by Fidelity Management & Research Company and Amplify, with participation from Alter Venture Partners, Dell Technologies Capital, and StepStone Group1

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. New investors AllianceBernstein, Baron Capital, and J.P. Morgan also joined the round2

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. The new funding brings SiMa.ai's total capital raised to over $500 million, marking a significant jump from its previous $960 million valuation after an $85 million Series B in July 20251

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Targeting the Untapped Physical AI Market

Founded in 2018 by Krishna Rangasayee, who previously served as COO of chipmaker Groq, SiMa.ai provides energy-efficient chips that eliminate the need to send data back and forth to the cloud1

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. Physical AI devices are hardware systems including robotics, drones, and autonomous vehicles that integrate artificial intelligence with sensors and actuators to reason about and take action in the real world2

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. "Physical AI in humanoids, automotive, and drones is the gateway to a $50 trillion market that has remained largely untouched by modern innovation," said Krishna Rangasayee2

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. The global market for Physical AI devices continues to surge as more connected machines are transformed into intelligent interfaces, and SiMa.ai is building the hardware and software that will act as the "brains" for these machines2

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Competing Against Nvidia With Low-Latency Cost-Effective Chips

SiMa.ai hopes that its low-latency performance and more affordable chips, compared to Nvidia's GPUs, will help it capture the growing market for AI for physical world applications, including humanoid robotics1

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. Rangasayee stated the funding would help "catapult" SiMa.ai into a dominant position by giving it resources to scale its purpose-built platform and compete against incumbent rival Nvidia, which produces more expensive CUDA-based hardware2

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. While Nvidia's CUDA-based architecture dominates the market for Physical AI software, it remains among the most complex and power-hungry solutions2

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. SiMa.ai seeks to offer a lower-power alternative that includes custom-built silicon and software support that can deploy in days or hours2

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Scaling Palette Neat and Building Next-Generation System-on-Chip

The capital raise will fund scaling Palette Neat, the company's industry-first agentic development environment for Physical AI, and building the next generation of its embedded AI compute platform, Modalix, intended for embedded robotics2

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. SiMa.ai aims to deliver 1,000 tera operations per second with new hardware in the first half of 20282

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. For context, the highest-end Nvidia modules, the Jetson AGX Thor series, hit 2,000 FP4 TOPS and are designed for full-scale humanoid robots and complex autonomous machines, while mainstream robotic modules such as Jetson T2000 and T3000 cover around 400 and 865 TOPS for mid-tier robotic arms and heavy delivery drones2

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. The next-generation system-on-chip will enable SiMa.ai to aggressively expand into medium- to high-end drones, humanoid robotics, automotive advanced driver assistance systems, and AI-powered cockpits2

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. Current customers and partners include ARK Electronics, AverMedia Technologies, Robert Bosch, Emerson Electric, Micron Technology, and Synopsys2

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