NuviaSource: Crunchbase

What you need to know

  • Three former Apple executives have founded a chip company called NUVIA Inc.
  • Gerard Williams III, Manu Gulati, and John Bruno were all previously employed by Apple.
  • NUVIA hopes to apply the lessons of mobile chip design to larger data center servers.

Three former Apple executives who worked in Cupertino's chip department have set up a brand new company to take on Intel and AMD.

Gerard Williams III, Manu Gulati, and John Bruno all previously worked for Apple. As reported by Reuters Williams was chief architect for all Apple central processors and systems-on-a-chip for nine years, Gulati spent eight years working on mobile systems-on-a-chip, and Bruno worked for five years in apple's platform architecture group.

Their new company, NUVIA Inc., aims to take the lessons of mobile chip design and apply them on a grander scale:

At NUVIA, the group's goal is to take the lessons learned designing powerful chips for small, battery-powered devices such as iPhones and apply them to large, electricity hungry data center servers. The founders aim to make a chip that is faster, more power efficient and more secure than existing data center processors, Williams told Reuters.

"We want to bring all these aspects that we have developed over time through our careers to this new market and really exploit them in this market, because it's an area ripe for innovation and advancement," Williams told Reuters in an interview.

One analyst backs Nuvia to be a "formidable new entrant" into the chip market, based on the team's previous track record. Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategies cited the team's "unprecedented" performance gains with each new generation of chips at Apple.

"I've been in and around semiconductor companies for 30 years. There are never any guarantees, but one thread that I've seen is that the most successful chip companies have rock star architects and developers."

NUVIA Inc. has drummed up $53 million in its Series A round of funding, including investment from Dell. Also on board are Capricorn Investment Group, Mayfield and WRVI Capital, as well as Nepenthe LLC. Scott Darling of Dell told Reuters:

"The silicon industry is relentless. It pounds forward... You have to have a world-class team to do something disruptive enough that it will prevail despite the response of competitors. At NUVIA, we think we have found one."