RISC-V chip startup AheadComputing has raised $21.5 million in a seed funding round.

Led by Eclipse and with participation from Maverick Capital, Fundomo, EPIQ Capital Group, and Tenstorrent CEO Jim Keller, the company said the funding would support the development and commercialization of its CPU technology.

Founded in July 2024 by former Intel CPU architects Debbie Marr, Jonathon Pearce, Mark Dechene, and Srikanth Srinivasan, the company is aiming to tackle CPU bottlenecks via the development of 64-bit RISC-V application processors.

The company says its microarchitecture innovations will “drive breakthrough performance improvements while optimizing power efficiency,” supporting the move away from legacy computer architectures to RISC-V.

While AheadComputing is yet to reveal much information about its proposed hardware offering, the company has said its first products will provide “industry-leading” single-thread and multi-core performance, which it claims will set new benchmarks in the compute landscape.

“The compute landscape is evolving rapidly, and AheadComputing is positioned to lead this transformation by delivering unprecedented performance in general-purpose processors,” said Marr, CEO and co-founder of AheadComputing. “With this funding, we will expand our world-class engineering team and accelerate the development of our core IP, enabling customers to meet their most demanding computing needs.”