SiMa.ai raises $150 million and quadruples its valuation in one year, to $1.45 billion

The designer of inference chips for robots and drones went from 340 million to 1.45 billion in valuation, twelve months after a Series B of 85 million.

SiMa.ai has closed a $150 million Series C round, co-led by Fidelity Management & Research and Amplify Partners, with Dell Technologies Capital, StepStone Group and Alter Venture Partners in the round. The post-money valuation is around $1.45 billion — compared to $340 million a year earlier in an $85 million Series B round.

The company designs chips and a software layer designed to run inference directly on devices with a tight energy budget: robots, autonomous systems, drones. The commercial argument lies in the emancipation of the cloud, a prohibitive constraint for a machine that must decide in a few milliseconds without a guaranteed network link.

The funds are to be used to ramp up production and develop MLZ, the toolkit for developers who build on the platform. Its founder, Krishna Rangasayee, was chief operating officer of Groq, a competitor in the field of inference accelerators.