Ethernovia Raises $64M To Boost Electric Vehicle Manufacturing 

Ethernovia, an ethernet chip company from California, announced on Monday it raised $64 million in Series A funding. Porsche Automobile Holding SE, VentureTech Alliance, Qualcomm Ventures and Western Digital Capital were among the participating investors.

The U.S. is currently spending billions of dollars to manufacture chips in America instead of buying from China. Last year, the Biden Administration signed the CHIPS and Science Act, which would funnel more than $50 billion into semiconductor chip manufacturing that is based in the country.  From a geopolitical standpoint, the U.S. wants to be reasonably self–reliant on its chip industry in case war, embargoes or trade disagreements impact its relations with East Asia.

These chips, which go into every tech gadget from television sets to cars, are becoming even more critical to the U.S. as it ramps up its production of electric vehicles. Enter companies like Ethernovia: the five-year-old startup builds one ethernet system that acts as the spine of the car, eliminating the need for hundreds of microchips interwoven by a handful of cables.

Changing industry standards

Simplifying the hardware and software system makes electric vehicle manufacturing faster to assemble and maintain, and makes it easier to troubleshoot an electric vehicle.

“The trends towards electrification and connectivity in the automotive industry as well as developments in the field of automated driving result in ever increasing requirements on fast and secure data transmission from a wide variety of sources in vehicles and to the cloud,” Lutz Meschke, Porsche SE board of management member, said in a statement.

Indeed, as electric vehicles become more widely adopted, the industry is bracing for scalable infrastructure that can quickly update with changing regulations around cybersecurity and accuracy on the road. Ethernovia’s suite of chips and software are part of a broader movement in the sector to meet those needs.

Related:

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• Funding To EV Startups Hit A 10-Year High. Now, It’s All About Execution.