Silicon Valley 5G chip startup EdgeQ raises $75 mln to boost production

On Wednesday, Silicon Valley 5G chip startup EdgeQ Inc. secured $75 million to ramp up production and market its technology to telecom operators.

EdgeQ also added Lattice Semiconductor Corp (LSCC.O) CEO Jim Anderson to its board.

Vinay Ravuri, CEO and co-founder of EdgeQ, said the company develops semiconductors for 5G telecom tower base stations and 5G access points that can be deployed in factories to run robotics and autonomous cars wirelessly. He said the chips support 4G cellular communications.

Ravuri stated WiFi is best effort and not guaranteed. “If it’s a precise welding machine and it needs to move exactly this much, that has to happen within a microsecond or a millisecond, and you can’t do that best effort way.”

Even if funding has dried up for many firms since Silicon Valley Bank’s bankruptcy in March, promising companies can still raise money.

Ravuri said EdgeQ is worth “hundreds of millions of dollars” and “definitely less than” $1 billion.

He said RISC-V, a new open chip architecture, made its 5G chip cheaper to design. He stated EdgeQ had reduced base station costs by 50% compared to current solutions.

EdgeQ, founded in 2018, builds products based on OpenRAN, an open standards body that allows operators to mix and match suppliers in their radio networks, competing with Ericsson (ERICb.ST), Huawei (HWT.UL), and Nokia (NOKIA.HE), which dominate the global telecoms equipment market with their proprietary technologies.