Onward and Upward: Celebrating Rivos' Next Chapter with Meta

Some moments define a company’s journey. Today marks one of those moments as we celebrate Meta’s acquisition of Rivos. This significant milestone validates the disruptive vision of co-founders Puneet Kumar, Mark Hayter, and Belli Kuttanna.

DTC invested in the team's Series A back in 2021. As a member of the board, I was lucky to serve alongside Lip-Bu Tan, Amarjit Gill, and Romit Shah. Due in part to their expertise and invaluable support for Rivos’s vision, we all enjoyed front-row seats to one of the most impressive stories in this generation of semiconductor startups.

A Bet on Unmatched Technical Expertise

Anyone in venture will tell you that investing in an early-stage company is always a bet on the team. With Rivos, that bet was on a group of highly experienced startup founders and deeply technical engineers. Together, they set out to build leading-edge AI accelerators and CPUs with a novel angle that they called software-defined hardware.

The approach was differentiated, and it challenged the conventional wisdom of hardware design. But it also had the potential to build flexibility and performance into the core of their architecture. From day one, this team executed with speed and precision in converting their vision into real products for next-gen data centers.

Leading in the RISC-V Open-Source Ecosystem

Indicative of the team's ethos that open collaboration is essential for innovation, Rivos was committed to the RISC-V open-source community and played a key role in driving industry progress.

Rivos’ contributions included founding the RISC-V Software Ecosystem (RISE) Project, and contributing significantly to RISC-V International, advancing critical server SoC specifications and performance analysis. Rivos engineers optimized the Go runtime for RISC-V and their work on the RVA23 profile standardized the 64-bit application processor ISA.

Through their commitment to the community, Rivos strengthened both their position and the broader RISC-V ecosystem, driving progress for all.

The Start of Something Big

The acquisition by Meta is a logical next step in Rivos' up-and-to-the-right trajectory. Now with the backing and scale that few companies can deliver, the Rivos team will have the opportunity to wholly shape the next generation of data center infrastructure.

We have been honored to be part of the Rivos story from its early days. To Puneet, Mark, Belli and the entire team: congratulations. Your hard work, relentless drive, perseverance, and technical genius have brought you to this moment. Today is not an end, but the beginning of something truly big. We are excited to watch you continue to build the future.

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