SiMa.ai, the San Jose chipmaker building silicon for robots and cameras rather than data centers, has raised a $150 million Series C at a $1.45 billion valuation. Fidelity Management & Research Company and Amplify led the round.

Alter Venture Partners, Dell Technologies Capital and StepStone Group also participated. Total capital raised now exceeds $500 million.

AI Without the Cloud

SiMa.ai makes energy-efficient chips and the software around them so devices can run AI models on-device, with no round trip to a data center.

That matters for anything that has to react in real time. A drone avoiding an obstacle or a robot arm adjusting its grip cannot wait on a network request, and many industrial deployments have no reliable connectivity at all.

The company was founded by CEO Krishna Rangasayee, previously chief operating officer at chipmaker Groq.

The Valuation Jump

The $1.45 billion valuation is up from $960 million at the company's Series B in July 2025.

TechCrunch reported the raise, noting the company is betting that low-latency performance and lower cost relative to Nvidia GPUs will win it share of the physical AI market, including humanoid robots.

The Physical AI Race

"Physical AI" has become the industry's shorthand for models that control machines in the world rather than generate text on a screen, and it has drawn a wave of capital across chips, robots and simulation.

The chip layer is the most capital-intensive part of it. Designing silicon, taping out and qualifying customers takes years, which is why a company at this stage has already raised more than half a billion dollars.

Why It Matters

Nvidia dominates AI training and much of inference in the data center, but edge devices have different constraints: tight power budgets, fixed costs per unit and physical space limits.

That gap is what independent chipmakers are targeting. SiMa.ai's pitch is efficiency and price, and with Dell Technologies Capital on the cap table it has at least one investor who knows what device makers will pay for.

Source

TechCrunch — "Physical AI chip developer SiMa AI hits $1.45B valuation"