- GeneralM&A
- March 17, 2021
- 5 minutes read
Qualcomm Closes $1.4B Purchase Of Chip Startup Nuvia
Nuvia, a chip startup co-founded by Apple veteran Gerard Williams, has definitely set its place as one of the fast-rising…
Nuvia, a chip startup co-founded by Apple veteran Gerard Williams, has definitely set its place as one of the fast-rising successes of the semiconductor industry in recent years. Founded just in 2019, it took only two years to reach a big exit with a $1.4 billion sale to chipmaking giant Qualcomm that was agreed to in January.
Now, Qualcomm has officially closed its agreed acquisition of Nuvia and absorbed the company, it’s announced. The sale has seen Nuvia’s Co-Founder and CEO Gerard Williams, a chip design legend in his right, take on a new role as SVP of Engineering at Qualcomm.
- Nuvia is in the business of designing data center processing chips based on the Arm architecture and it seems in this case that Qualcomm bought the company mainly for its Arm design expertise.
- Nuvia on the face of it has a talented team led by Gerard Williams, the former Chief CPU Architect at Apple. Its other co-founders, Manu Gulati and John Bruno, are veterans of both Apple and Google.
- For a fact, Williams was so important to Apple that the iPhone maker brought a lawsuit against him with accusations of breaching his contract while working at Apple after he left to start Nuvia. He then filed a countersuit and that court case is still ongoing.
- As a startup, Nuvia was well-funded to the tune of around $300 million, presumably due to the prowess of its founding team. Its investors included the likes of BlackRock, Temasek, and Mithril Capital Management.
- Qualcomm hints that it’ll apply Nuvia’s chip design talent and intellectual property to its own products, particularly for its line of Snapdragon CPUs. The chipmaking giant is targeting a broadening product roadmap at a time of rapid development of 5G technology.
- “We are excited to join the leading wireless innovator in the industry, driven by a common mission of inventing breakthrough technologies. Together, we will create a new class of high-performance computing platforms that set the bar for the industry,” Gerard Williams said in a statement.
