Nuvacore, a chip startup founded about six months ago, is raising hundreds of millions of dollars at a valuation near $2.5B, according to people familiar with the fundraising.
The company has no product on the market. Its target is a central processor for data centers, built to act as a traffic controller for AI accelerators and to run the autonomous agent software that increasingly sits on top of them.
The Information previously reported the company was seeking $200M or more. The new valuation figure has not been disclosed before. The round has not closed, and the terms could change.
The pitch rests on a contrarian thesis. Most accelerator clusters spend their time waiting on a host CPU that was never designed for the data movement and orchestration that agentic workloads demand.
Nuvacore had already published details of a core it calls WarpCore, built around an approach it describes as Core First, in which much of the foundational core IP is designed before an instruction set is locked in.
The team draws engineers from Apple, Qualcomm, AMD and Intel, which is much of the reason investors are willing to price a pre-revenue company this high.
It is a familiar pattern in this cycle. Capital is chasing pedigree and a credible architectural story, because the CPU sitting beside an accelerator has become a genuine bottleneck.
The open question is whether the design can ship before the current spending wave crests.
