RISC-V chip startup Akeana has exited stealth mode, having raised more than $100 million in initial funding.

The funding round was supported by a consortium that includes Kleiner Perkins, Mayfield, and Fidelity.

Founded in 2021 by the former Marvell Technology engineers who designed the ThunderX2 server chips, the San Jose-based Akeana provides customizable IP solutions across a range of semiconductor offerings, including microcontrollers and data centers.

Describing itself as a “high-performance, highly configurable alternative to Arm cores,” to coincide with the company’s official launch, Akeana has released three processor lines and two system-on-chip (SoC) IP offerings.

These include the Akeana 100 processors with 32-bit RISC-V cores optimized for microcontrollers and real-time processing; the Akeana 1000 series which includes 64-bit RISC-V cores and an MMU for AI and ML computation; and the Akeana 5000 series, a line of “extreme performance processors” which the company claims outperform its competitors and are optimized for laptop, data centers, and cloud infrastructure applications.

Meanwhile, Akeana’s newly launched IP portfolio includes processor system IP for creating processor SoCs, and an AI Matrix computation engine, designed to offload Matrix Multiply operations for AI acceleration.

“Our team has a proven track record of designing world-class server chips, and we are now applying that expertise to the broader semiconductor market as we formally go to market,” said Rabin Sugumar, Akeana CEO.

“With our rich portfolio of customizable cores and special security, debug, RAS, and telemetry features, we provide our customers with unparalleled performance, observability, and reliability. We believe our products will revolutionize the industry.”

All three core types and IP offerings are available for licensing.

RISC-V is an open standard instruction set (ISA) architecture based on established RISC (reduced instruction set computing) principles, which is provided under open source licenses that do not require fees. A number of companies are looking to bring RISC-V into data centers.