Innovium

Innovium, Inc. was incorporated in Delaware on December 11, 2014 by CEO Rajiv Khemani and CTO Puneet Agarwal to build merchant switch silicon for cloud and edge data centers, an area then overwhelmingly dominated (an estimated 90%+ share as of 2017) by Broadcom's Trident/Tomahawk ASIC families. Khemani previously spent over a decade at Cavium Networks (joining in 2003, rising to Chief Operating Officer by 2011 after running its Networking and Communications Division), preceded by five years at Intel Corporation (where he served as general manager of Intel's network processor business) and earlier roles at NetApp and Sun Microsystems; he holds a B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT New Delhi, an M.S. in Computer Science from NYU, and an MBA from Stanford. Agarwal, Innovium's CTO, brought more than 20 years of experience defining and architecting networking silicon. Based in San Jose, California, Innovium built its TERALYNX line of programmable switch ASICs (Teralynx 5, 7 and 8, spanning roughly 6.4 to 25.6+ Tbps), emphasizing high port radix, large on-chip packet buffers, deterministic low latency and rich telemetry, and it supported open networking stacks such as SONiC.

Innovium raised roughly $400 million in venture funding across Series A through F rounds (2015-2020) from investors including Greylock (first partnered at Series B, board seat held by partner Asheem Chandna), Celesta Capital (board member Lip-Bu Tan), Capricorn Investment Group / Technology Impact Growth Fund (board member Dipender Saluja), S-Cubed Capital (board member Mark Stevens), Redline Capital (board member Tatiana Evtushenkova), Premji Invest / PI Opportunities Fund (board member T.K. Kurien), Qualcomm Ventures, BlackRock, DFJ Growth, DAG Ventures and WRVI. Its final independent financing, disclosed in July 2020, was a $170 million round that reportedly pushed Innovium's valuation above $1 billion (unicorn status); SEC merger filings imply that round raised approximately $143.6 million in primary proceeds at a post-money valuation near $1.3 billion. By mid-2020, Innovium said most of the world's 25 largest cloud providers were testing or using its chips in production, and it had captured roughly 20% share of the merchant cloud switch-silicon market within a few years of its first product shipping; Cisco was among the vendors building switch lines around Innovium silicon.

On August 3, 2021, Marvell Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ: MRVL) announced a definitive agreement to acquire Innovium in an all-stock transaction valued at $1.1 billion (approximately 19.05 million shares of Marvell common stock, based on Marvell's 10-day VWAP as of July 30, 2021), inclusive of roughly $145 million of Innovium cash, for a net cost to Marvell of about $955 million. Marvell said the deal would broaden its cloud data-center switch silicon portfolio (complementing its Prestera line and its 2021 Inphi acquisition), that Innovium had been selected as a significant supplier at a 'Tier 1 cloud customer,' and that the combination was expected to add about $150 million of incremental revenue in Marvell's fiscal 2023. Innovium CEO Rajiv Khemani signed on as an advisor to Marvell post-close, while CTO/founder Puneet Agarwal joined Marvell along with the Innovium engineering team to continue the cloud-optimized switch roadmap (rebranded as Marvell's Teralynx 9K family). The transaction was approved by both companies' boards and by Innovium's stockholders, and Marvell announced completion of the acquisition on October 5, 2021. Innovium's website (innovium.com) now redirects to marvell.com, and the Teralynx product line has continued to be developed and shipped under the Marvell brand (including Teralynx 10 at 51.2 Tbps and later generations reaching 102.4 Tbps).

Business model

Fabless semiconductor company that designs and sells merchant switch ASICs (system-on-chip silicon) to OEMs, ODMs and hyperscale cloud operators for use in data center network switches.

Direct sale/licensing of switch silicon (ASICs) and associated reference designs/software (TERACertified, SONiC support) to OEM/ODM switch makers and cloud data center operators.