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SiMa.ai secures $150 million Series C, valued at $1.45 billion. GTM & Outbound Investigative Reporter - 2026-09-30 - 1 min SiMa.ai announced a $150 million Series C round led by Fidelity Management & Research Company and Amplify, valuing the San Jose startup at $1.45 billion ventureburn.com. The oversubscribed round also attracted J.P. Morgan, AllianceBernstein, Baron Capital and the State of Michigan, bringing total capital raised to $500 million. The cash will be poured into aggressive research and development, with the company targeting a 1,000 dense TOPS AI chip by 2028. SiMa.ai's proprietary Palette Neat software and purpose-built silicon aim to replace power-hungry GPUs in autonomous cars, drones and robots, cutting deployment times from months to days. By securing partnerships with Bosch, Synopsys and Micron, SiMa.ai is moving beyond prototype to commercial scale, challenging NVIDIA's dominance in cloud training by offering low-power, on-device inference. Analysts project 145 million physical AI devices shipped by 2035, a market SiMa.ai hopes to capture with its edge-optimized chips. Topics: #MarTech #News Aura-V Engineering Advisory Interested in implementing this technology inside your company? Its studio designs custom agent meshes, data pipelines, and outbound GTM systems for forward-looking enterprises.

San Jose chipmaker SiMa.ai hits $1.45 billion valuation on $150M round. Published on September 29, 2026 333 W. San Carlos St. - SiMa.ai Company Location Google Street View A San Jose semiconductor company that builds chips letting robots and drones think for themselves just landed a $150 million cash infusion, and with it, a valuation of $1.45 billion. SiMa.ai, which makes hardware and software for what it calls Physical AI, announced the Series C financing, bringing its total capital raised to $500 million. The company plans to pour the money into scaling its software platform and developing a new generation of chips aimed at humanoid robots, drones and cars. The round was co-led by Fidelity Management & Research Company and Amplify, according to a press release from SiMa.ai. Four new institutional investors joined the round: AllianceBernstein, Baron Capital, J.P. Morgan and the State of Michigan. As citybiz reported, the fresh capital is meant to support both product development and commercial expansion for the eight-year-old company. SiMa.ai was founded in 2018 by Krishna Rangasayee, who previously served as chief operating officer at chipmaker Groq, per TechCrunch. The company builds what it describes as a full-stack computing platform, pairing purpose-built silicon with software that lets AI workloads run directly on physical devices rather than relying on a distant data center. TechCrunch describes the pitch simply: chips and software that let robots, drones, cameras and other devices run AI directly on the device itself. A bet on the $50 trillion physical world. Rangasayee has framed the opportunity in sweeping terms, saying that Physical AI in humanoids, automotive and drones is the gateway to a $50 trillion market that has remained largely untouched by modern innovation. SiMa.ai is concentrating its $500 million in funding on computing infrastructure meant to serve exactly that kind of physical-world machine. The company's platform is designed around the power, latency and deployment constraints unique to edge environments, where devices can't always lean on cloud servers for split-second decisions. That framing puts SiMa.ai squarely in competition with entrenched players. According to SiliconANGLE, SiMa.ai is positioning itself as a lower-power alternative to Nvidia's CUDA-based hardware and software stack. Nvidia's high-end Jetson AGX Thor modules already hit 2,000 FP4 TOPS of compute, with the smaller Jetson T2000 and T3000 modules delivering roughly 400 and 865 TOPS respectively, the outlet reports, giving a sense of the benchmark SiMa.ai is chasing. Next-Generation chips targeted for 2028. SiMa.ai plans to develop a new generation of Physical AI hardware targeting 1,000 dense TOPS of computing performance, with that hardware portfolio slated to arrive in the first half of 2028. The planned lineup will include machine-learning intellectual property, chiplets and systems-on-chip, according to DatacenterDynamics. Customers already working with SiMa.ai's current products are expected to be able to migrate their applications onto that future hardware architecture without starting over. The expansion push extends the company's reach into medium- and high-end drones, humanoid robotics, automotive advanced driver assistance systems and AI-powered vehicle cockpits, alongside existing work in industrial automation, aerospace and defense, smart vision and healthcare applications. SiMa.ai's customer and partner network already spans companies including Bosch, Micron, Emerson, Synopsys, Kontron, TRUMPF, Intrinsic, AVerMedia, STIGA, L&T Technology Services, Ark Electronics and Virya Autonomous Technologies. Palette Neat aims to speed up development. Much of the new funding is earmarked for scaling Palette Neat, the agentic software environment SiMa.ai launched in June that's built for moving AI applications onto physical systems. The company describes Palette Neat as shortening that process from months down to days or even hours. SiMa.ai says it plans to expand the software environment further as part of its broader roadmap. The company points to strong financial momentum behind the raise. SiMa.ai has said its revenue growth quadrupled year over year between 2024 and 2025, and that it has continued to see upward revenue momentum through 2026. Scott Darling, president and managing director of Dell Technologies Capital, said SiMa.ai's platform delivers the software agility and Physical AI-optimized compute needed to scale computer vision and autonomous capabilities. Alongside Fidelity and Amplify, the Series C also drew participation from Alter Venture Partners, Dell Technologies Capital, Maverick Capital, +ND Capital, Point72 and StepStone Group. SiMa.ai points to broader industry research from Counterpoint Research projecting cumulative global shipments of Physical AI devices to reach 145 million units by 2035, a figure the company cites as evidence of the market it's chasing. Part of a broader chip-funding wave. SiMa.ai isn't alone in drawing big money for physical-world AI chips. Just two weeks earlier, Dutch AI chip startup Euclyd raised a $230 million round co-led by Samsung, Somerset Capital Partners, the Scaleup Europe Fund and Innovation Industries, according to CNBC. Euclyd is aiming to roll out its own physical chip systems in 2028 and serve thousands of enterprise customers by 2030, targeting revenue both from selling hardware and rack systems and from licensing its intellectual property, per the same report. SiMa.ai's own funding history includes some conflicting detail about its prior raise. TechCrunch reports the company was previously valued at $960 million after an $85 million Series B in July 2025, while SiMa.ai's own August 2025 announcement described that $85 million round as bringing its total capital raised to $355 million at the time. Either way, the company's valuation has climbed sharply since then, positioning SiMa.ai as one of the more closely watched names in the crowded race to put artificial intelligence directly inside the machines that move through the physical world.

SiMa.ai becomes a unicorn after raising $150 mn to scale Physical AI. The Series C round values the company at $1.45 billion as it expands into robotics, automotive and drones. SEPTEMBER 29, 2026, 10:48 AM Physical AI company SiMa.ai has raised $150 million in Series C funding to scale its AI platform across robotics, automotive and drones. The funding brings SiMa.ai's total capital raised to $500 million and its valuation to $1.45 billion, making it a unicorn. The funding round was co-led by Fidelity Management & Research Company and Amplify. Alter Venture Partners, Dell Technologies Capital and StepStone Group also participated, with AllianceBernstein, Baron Capital and JP Morgan joining as new investors. SiMa.ai will use the funds to scale its software platform and develop new Physical AI hardware. The company also plans to scale Palette Neat, its agentic software environment for Physical AI. It will also fund its next generation of purpose-built silicon. "Physical AI in humanoids, automotive, and drones is the gateway to a $50 trillion market," Founder and CEO Krishna Rangasayee said. The company expects the new hardware to deliver up to 1,000 TOPS of compute. The company has scheduled these products for the first half of 2028. The planned hardware will include machine learning IP, chiplets and systems-on-chip. SiMa.ai will target medium and high-end drones, humanoid robotics and automotive applications. It will also target advanced driver assistance systems and AI-powered cockpits. Existing customers will be able to migrate their applications to the new architectures. SiMa.ai said its commercial growth also supported the latest funding round. The company quadrupled year-over-year revenue growth between 2024 and 2025. It also said revenue momentum remains strong in 2026. SiMa.ai currently serves more than 150 customers across automotive, drones and robotics. Its customers include Bosch, Emerson, Intrinsic, Kontron, L&T Technology Services, Mistral, STIGA, Synopsys, and Virya Autonomous Technologies. Rangasayee said the company has built a full-stack platform instead of adapting cloud offerings. Counterpoint Research projects cumulative shipments of 145 million Physical AI devices by 2035. SiMa.ai said this shift will move AI from software applications into physical consumer and industrial systems. SiMa.ai was founded in 2018 to develop software-centric silicon for physical-world applications. Its platform combines the Modalix MLSoC with Palette Neat for Physical AI development. The company says this approach can reduce application development timelines from months to days or hours. Its board includes semiconductor and technology executives such as former Xilinx CEO Moshe Gavrielov and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan. Your reaction Discussion. No comments yet - be the first to share your view.