Physical AI Chipmaker SiMa.ai Raises $150M Series C at $1.45B Valuation

Robots, self-driving cars, and drones increasingly need to make decisions on the spot rather than waiting on a round-trip to the cloud. The catch is that most of these “Physical AI” devices still lean on expensive, power-hungry Nvidia GPUs to get there. Counterpoint Research projects cumulative shipments of Physical AI devices across robotics, automotive, and drones will hit 145 million units by 2035 — a market SiMa.ai is chasing with a large new round.

Based in San Jose, California, SiMa.ai designs both the silicon and the software for embedded edge AI as one full-stack platform. Its system-on-chip, Modalix, runs computer vision, transformer, and generative AI workloads on a single piece of silicon, paired with Palette, a no-code development suite. The new capital will scale Palette Neat, billed as the industry’s first agentic development environment for Physical AI, and fund a next-generation chip targeting 1,000 dense TOPS of compute, slated for the first half of 2028.

SiMa.ai was founded by Krishna Rangasayee, who spent 18 years at Xilinx — rising to senior vice president and GM, and later EVP of global sales, while growing that business to $2.5 billion in revenue at 70% gross margin. He then served as COO of AI inference chipmaker Groq before founding SiMa.ai in 2018. Where Groq built inference chips for the data center, Rangasayee set out to build the chip that runs inside the edge device itself — the robot, the car, the drone.

SiMa.ai has raised $150 million in a Series C round co-led by Fidelity Management & Research Company and Amplify Partners, bringing its total capital raised to $500 million and its valuation to $1.45 billion. That’s up 51% from the $960 million mark it held after an $85 million raise just over a year earlier, in August 2025 — and it makes SiMa.ai a unicorn eight years after founding. “Physical AI in humanoids, automotive, and drones is the gateway to a $50 trillion market that has remained largely untouched by modern innovation,” said Krishna Rangasayee, Founder and CEO.

Returning backers Alter Venture Partners, Dell Technologies Capital, Maverick Capital, +ND Capital, Point72, and StepStone Group joined the round, alongside new investors AllianceBernstein, Baron Capital, J.P. Morgan, and the State of Michigan’s pension system. SiMa.ai says its revenue quadrupled year-over-year between 2024 and 2025 and has kept climbing this year, with a customer and partner roster that includes Fortune 500 names like Bosch, Micron, Synopsys, and Emerson.

SiMa.ai isn’t alone chasing Physical AI silicon. Israel’s Hailo has shipped more than 500,000 units and is widely seen as the current leader in edge AI accelerators; it raised $120 million in April 2024 at a $1.2 billion valuation. More recently, though, local media have reported Hailo’s valuation has been cut to under $500 million as it pursues a SPAC listing — a sharp contrast to SiMa.ai’s climb over the same stretch. The Netherlands’ Axelera AI is targeting the same efficiency gap, aiming to bring data-center-class performance down to edge-level power draw, and raised a $68 million Series B last year, bringing its total to $120 million. Quadric takes a different approach entirely, licensing its processor IP rather than building its own chips, and raised a $30 million Series C this past January.

Groq, Rangasayee’s former employer, is often compared to SiMa.ai for sharing a similar chip-design philosophy, though the two don’t really compete — Groq targets cloud inference, not the edge. SiMa.ai frames the fight as being against the incumbent, too: in its announcement, the company suggested rivals are still assembling the pieces or repackaging their cloud products for the edge — a thinly veiled jab at Nvidia’s GPUs.

If SiMa.ai is building the “brain” for robots and vehicles, Ethernovia is building the “nervous system” — Ethernet-based packet processors that move sensor and vision data around autonomous systems. The adjacent startup raised a $90 million Series B led by Maverick Silicon this past January, pushing its total funding past $154 million.