NUVIA, Founded By Former Apple & Google Chipmakers, Raises $53M Series A

NUVIA, a new company made up of ex-Apple and Google engineers, announced this morning it has raised $53 million in a Series A round of funding.

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The nine-month-old Santa Clara-based startup’s mission is to “reimagine silicon design to deliver industry-leading performance and energy efficiency for the data center.” Or to put it more simply, Reuters noted that the company’s goal “is to make a chip that is faster, more power efficient and more secure than existing data center processors” and take on heavyweights such as Intel and AMD.

John Bruno, Manu Gulati and Gerard Williams III founded NUVIA, and combined have been granted more than 100 patents related to system engineering and silicon design. Besides Apple and Google, the chipmakers previously held engineering roles at ARM, Broadcom and AMD.

Capricorn Investment Group, Dell Technologies Capital, Mayfield and WRVI Capital co-led the round, which also included participation from Nepenthe LLC.1

“The world is creating more data than it can process as we become increasingly dependent on high-speed information access, always-on rich media experiences and ubiquitous connectivity,” said NUVIA CEO Gerard Williams III in a press release. “A step-function increase in compute performance and power efficiency is needed to feed these growing user needs. The timing couldn’t be better to create a new model for high-performance silicon design.”

Most recently, prior to co-founding NUVIA, Williams served as a senior director at Apple and Chief CPU Architect for nearly a decade. Manu was the lead SoC Architect for consumer hardware at Google, and played a role in defining the company’s silicon and product roadmap. Bruno was a system architect at Google.

Dipender Saluja, managing partner of Capricorn’s Technology Impact Fund, said in the release that NUVIA can push beyond the “conventional limitations of the semiconductor industry” with an approach to silicon design “that provides non-linear increases in performance and energy efficiency.”

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