China VCs flock to nine-month-old CPU chip designer
Cix Technology, a China-based supplier of CPU chips, has raised a pre-Series-A funding round led by Nio Capital and Qiming Venture Partners. The size was not disclosed but the company claims to have raised USD 100m since inception.
Other investors include BAI Capital, CoStone Capital, Harvest Capital, Sky9 Capital, CAS Star, and Oriza Hua. CAS Star is a venture capital unit under the China Academy of Sciences, while Oriza Hua is a dedicated integrated circuit (IC) fund managed by Oriza Holding.
Cix was established as recently as October 2021 and closed its angel and extended angel rounds in February. The former was led by Lenovo Capital with participation from Incubator Group. The latter featured Qiming Venture Partners, Shunwei Capital, Oriza Hua, Sky9, and Winsoul Capital.
Proceeds were earmarked for product development and market expansion.
The company, which is based in Shanghai and has branches in Suzhou, Beijing, and Wuhan, aims to create ARM-compatible CPU system-on-chip (SoC) designs. CEO Hank Sun was previously SoC director at AMD.
The goal is to provide a variety of general-purpose smart chips for use in notebook computers, tablets, and smart cockpits. These are not dissimilar to Apple's recently launched M2 smart processor.
SoC is an IC that brings together all or most components of a computer or other electronic system. Cix claims the integration of CPUs, GPUs and NPUs in its chips constitutes a major trend. GPU chips are often referred to as artificial intelligence chips in China, while NPUs, or neural processing units, feature a microprocessor that specialises in the acceleration of machine learning algorithms.
It estimates that an integrated chip can complete multiple types of tasks and improve computing power and performance while reducing power consumption by 40% compared to conventional chips. The first product will be released in 2023.
For smart cockpit applications, Sun said that Cix will look to provide a chip solution of greater computing power and higher energy efficiency. This would improve the fluency of vehicle systems and support more complex applications as well as extend the service life of vehicles.
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