Former Apple chip designers raise $53 million with new company

Three chip designers who have worked for years at Apple on socs have started their own company. The company is called Nuvia and has already raised USD 53 million in investments. The company is working on a processor for servers under the name Phoenix.

Nuvia was founded early this year by Gerard Williams III, Manu Gulati and John Bruno. The former was the chief designer of Apple socs from the A7 to the A12X. He worked for Apple for nine years. Gulati and Bruno spent eight and five years respectively at Apple on SOCs.

The creation of the new company had not been announced until now. Nuvia has recently been looking for investors. The first investment round has been closed with a yield of 53 million dollars. Dell Technologies Capital, among others, invests in Nuvia.

The company tells Reuters that the money will expand the number of employees. Now there are sixty, by the end of this year there should be one hundred. Nuvia’s goal is to develop efficient processors for servers. The chipmakers have a lot of expertise when it comes to designing energy-efficient chips for smartphones and want to extend that to larger chips for data centers. It is not yet known when Nuvia wants to release its first processor.

The three founders of Nuvia are all prominent chip designers. Gerard Williams III, the CEO of the new company, started his career in 1995 as an intern at Intel. He later worked for Texas Instruments and ARM before joining Apple. Manu Gulati worked at AMD, Broadcom, Apple and Google. He was hired as lead soc architect at the search giant in 2017. John Bruno started at GPU maker ATI and later worked on APUs at AMD. He then spent five years at Apple and a year at Google’s hardware team.