Intel has acquired Soft Machines, a Santa Clara-based chip designer operating in the USA, India and Russia. The US corporation bought the stakes of the existing investors, which included two Russian state-owned corporations, the fund of funds RVC and nanotech giant Rusnano, along with AMD, Samsung and other companies.
Revealed by the media in September last year, the deal was confirmed last month by Intel’s finance chief Bob Swan in a meeting with investors, and more recently by Rusnano USA’s CEO Dmitry Astakhov in an exchange with Russian business daily Vedomosti.
The terms of the deals have not been disclosed officially, but media reports have put the acquisition price at $250 million or $300 million in cash or shares.
“It’s not particularly good news for investors who have so far poured at least $200 million [$220.89 million according to CrunchBase] in funding into the biz since it was founded in 2006,” The Register commented in September 2016.
However, an RVC representative told Vedomosti that the investment was profitable for his company.
Soft Machines presents itself as a semiconductor company co-developing VISC architecture-based processor and SoC products for all major performance computing platforms. Its mission is “to revive microprocessor performance per watt scaling,” says its website.
