Qualcomm has acquired Akeana, a US startup that designs processor cores and other chip building blocks based on the open-source RISC-V instruction set. The deal became public on October 21, 2026, when Korea's Electronic Times reported it, citing a LinkedIn post by Akeana's founder and chief executive.
Neither company disclosed the price or other terms. Qualcomm did not issue a press release, and Akeana's website made no mention of the deal when it was checked on October 22.
Akeana's chief executive, Rabin Sugumar, has joined Qualcomm as vice president of engineering. According to the Electronic Times, he wrote that Akeana's IP and team had found a new home within Qualcomm. Sammy Fans and Dealroom reported that Akeana's technology and engineering team are moving to Qualcomm.
What Akeana built
Akeana was founded in 2021 by engineers who had designed Marvell's ThunderX2 server processors. It came out of stealth in August 2024 with a licensable portfolio of RISC-V designs, according to SDxCentral, which put the company in San Jose, California.
The line-up ran from the Akeana 100 series of 32-bit cores for microcontrollers and real-time work, through the 64-bit Akeana 1000 series aimed at AI and machine learning, to the Akeana 5000 series, which the company pitched for laptops, data centres and cloud infrastructure. It also licensed system IP for building processor chips and a matrix engine that takes matrix multiplication off the main cores to speed up AI workloads.
In December 2025 Akeana taped out Alpine, a 4-nanometre test chip with 64-bit out-of-order server-class cores, smaller control and vector cores, and LPDDR5 and PCIe 5 interfaces, according to its website. The chip was built with Samsung Foundry, and in June 2026 the two companies announced a partnership to pair Akeana's IP with Samsung's 4nm process for server chips, the Electronic Times reported.
Why Qualcomm is buying
RISC-V is an open instruction set that any company can use without paying licence fees to Arm, whose designs sit inside most smartphone chips, including Qualcomm's. Qualcomm's custom Oryon CPU cores, which came from its purchase of Nuvia, are built on Arm's architecture.
The Electronic Times said Qualcomm wants to reduce its dependence on a single architecture, pointing to the risk created by Qualcomm's licensing dispute with Arm, and that in-house RISC-V technology would support a push into edge AI and data-centre servers.
The deal follows Qualcomm's acquisition of Ventana Micro Systems, another RISC-V processor designer, in December 2025. The Register reported at the time that Qualcomm planned to keep developing Ventana's designs alongside its Arm-based Oryon cores. Akeana adds a second team with experience building server-class processors.
The founders and the funding
Akeana raised more than $100 million before it launched publicly in 2024, from a group of investors that included Kleiner Perkins, Mayfield and Fidelity. The company did not break the figure into rounds, and no later funding was reported.
Sugumar has not commented publicly on the deal beyond his LinkedIn post, in which, according to the Electronic Times, he said he was proud of the team's work in building a broad portfolio of high-performance IP. Akeana's headcount was not reported.
No valuation was disclosed, so it is not known how the price compares with the money Akeana raised.
What is still unknown
Qualcomm has not said what will happen to Akeana's existing licensing business, including the Samsung Foundry work and any customers that licensed its cores. The Electronic Times did not give a closing date, saying only that the acquisition had recently become public and that Sugumar joined Qualcomm in October.
There are also no announced customer commitments or product timelines tied to the acquisition, so for now the deal is mainly a purchase of engineers and designs that Qualcomm can use in future chips.
For the RISC-V market, the purchase removes one of the few well-funded independent suppliers of high-performance cores. Qualcomm now owns two of them, which gives it more of its own options if it moves away from Arm designs in servers or other products.
