China’s SpacemiT has raised over 600 million yuan ($86.1 million) in a Series B funding round, as the computing chip company is set to introduce its latest RISC-V K3 chips that will continue to focus on powering artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled devices and robotics.
The Hangzhou-based startup raised the Series B round from multiple state investors, including the China Internet Investment Fund (CIIF), the Beijing Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund, and a venture capital (VC) investment platform under the Beijing State-Owned Capital Operation and Management Company Limited, according to a statement by SpacemiT on Thursday (Jan 15).
The Agricultural Bank of China’s asset investment unit, Hangzhou-based asset management firm Huaxia Hengtian, private equity (PE) firm Forebright Capital, and its existing shareholders also supported the deal.
The new financing will allow SpacemiT to invest in further advancing the computing power of its next-generation RISC-V AI chips to better serve emerging applications from AI-enabled computers to AI robots. The startup also plans to strengthen its talent pool, as it expects the rapid rise of AI to drive wider adoption of the open-source architecture.
SpacemiT, founded in November 2021, mainly develops next-generation RISC-V high-performance central processing units (CPUs) and integrated hardware and software optimisation solutions.
With its chips designed to support the development of large language models (LLMs), the startup specialises in RISC-V, an open-standard Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) that provides the flexible, customisable foundation for building efficient processors for Edge AI.
It is betting on the growing prominence of Edge AI, which brings AI processing directly to local devices, or the “edge,” where data is generated, instead of sending it to a remote cloud. This enables real-time analysis, faster decisions, improved privacy, and reduced bandwidth by operating locally, even offline, on everything from smartphones and smart home devices to industrial sensors and vehicles.
SpacemiT is working on its latest RISC-V AI CPU, K3, which is expected to start mass production in April this year after completing tape-out—the critical milestone where a finalised, thoroughly verified chip design is sent to a foundry for manufacturing—last year, founder and CEO Chen Zhijian told the South China Morning Post.
Since the launch of its first octa-core 64-bit RISC-V AI chip K1 in 2024, the startup said it has shipped over 150,000 units to date, with applications in open-source hardware, AI-enabled devices, and robotics.
