Physical AI chip startup SimaAI (시마.ai) raised $150 million after being valued at $1.45 billion. SiliconANGLE reported on Sept. 28 that SimaAI plans to use the funds to expand its development environment and to develop a next-generation embedded AI compute platform.

Sima.ai develops semiconductors and software that serve as the brain in physical AI hardware.

The Series C round was co-led by Fidelity Management & Research Co and Amplify. Alter Venture Partners, Dell Technologies Capital and StepStone Group also took part, while AllianceBernstein, Baron Capital and JPMorgan joined as new investors.

SimaAI plans to use the funds to expand its agent-based development environment for physical AI, called Palette Knit, and to develop Modalix, a next-generation system-on-chip for embedded robotics. The new hardware targets reaching 1,000 TOPS in the first half of 2028.

Krishna Rangasayee (크리슈나 랑가사이), SimaAI's founder and chief executive officer, said the funding secured resources to expand its purpose-built platform and gave it a foundation to compete with Nvidia. SimaAI says its differentiator is lower power consumption than Nvidia CUDA-based hardware.

Nvidia's Jetson AGX Thor series is designed for large humanoid robots and complex autonomous machines at about 2,000 FP4 TOPS. By contrast, Jetson T2000 and Jetson T3000 target mid-range robot arms and large delivery drones at about 400 TOPS and 865 TOPS, respectively. SimaAI said it can bundle custom silicon and software support to deploy within days or hours.

SimaAI plans to expand into mid-to-high-end drones, humanoid robotics and advanced driver assistance systems, based on its next-generation hardware.