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.
