Focusing on the research and development of high-performance domestic processor chips, Chaorui Technology has completed a 100 million yuan Series A1 round of financing | 36Kr exclusive.
Author | Ye Danxuan
Editor | Yuan Silai
36Kr has learned that Chaorui Technology, a domestic processor chip R & D company, has recently completed its Round A1 financing, with an amount in the hundreds of millions of yuan. This round of financing is led by Hongtai Fund, with Longding Investment, Sanhe Capital and other institutions participating, and Deepblue Capital serving as the exclusive financial advisor. This financing will be mainly used for the R & D and commercialization of high-performance CPU products.
Chaorui Technology was established in 2021, and its core team was formed in 2019. It focuses on the development of high-performance CPUs based on the RISC-V architecture. The company's core businesses include the design, development and sales of high-performance processor core IP, high-performance CPUs and related SoC chips. The company's products are widely used in the fields of edge computing, the Internet of Things, industrial control, cloud computing and other information technology application innovation industries (hereinafter referred to as the "IT Innovation Industry").
The CPU (Central Processing Unit) is the heart of a computer system, responsible for processing and executing system instructions. It can be said that the CPU is the basis and core of modern electronic information systems. For a long time, the high-end processor market has been dominated by American companies such as Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm. In October 2022, the export control regulations of the US Department of Commerce showed that Chinese companies will be unable to purchase advanced CPUs and GPUs from relevant US companies. At the same time, in the mainstream instruction set architectures of CPUs, the company that owns the relatively most widely used ARM architecture has restrictions on providing high-performance processor core IP authorization to domestic CPU manufacturers, and currently no domestic company has officially announced obtaining the ARM v9 instruction set architecture authorization.
Based on the consideration of the independent controllability of information infrastructure, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology proposed the development of the IT Innovation Industry in 2019, which has led to a significant improvement in the technical level and market scale of domestic CPU manufacturers. Taking the communication field as an example, in 2020, the proportion of domestic CPU servers in the PC server purchases of China Telecom and China Mobile was only about 20%. Among them, the CPUs of Intel and AMD accounted for 79.4% of China Telecom's purchase share that year. In China Telecom's server centralized procurement from 2024 to 2025, the proportion of domestic CPUs reached 67.5%. Shi Jun, the CEO of Chaorui Technology, also disclosed to 36Kr that the team estimates that the sales of domestic CPUs may increase to a scale of 30 billion in the next few years.
In the discussion of the CPU R & D technical level, an unavoidable concept is: the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) of the CPU. The design of the instruction set architecture is directly related to the performance indicators, energy consumption efficiency of the CPU, and more importantly, the software ecological compatibility.
Currently, the three mainstream CPU architectures in the market are X86, ARM and RISC-V. The "2024 - 2026 China IT Innovation Hardware Industry Development Suggestion Report" shows that currently, domestic CPUs mainly choose the X86 and ARM architectures in the technical route.
Comparison of Three Mainstream CPU Architectures
Jiang Jiang, the CTO of Chaorui Technology, introduced to 36Kr that due to the heavy historical burden and high power consumption, the problems of the X86 architecture have been difficult to solve, while the licensing fee of the ARM architecture is high, and the authorization of subsequent versions is basically impossible. Chaorui Technology chooses to use the open (Open) RISC-V instruction set architecture standard in its self-developed CPU, which can ensure the independent controllability of the processor R & D while maintaining consistency with the international mainstream software ecosystem. "It can be said that the RISC-V architecture processor developed by Chaorui Technology provides a new and relatively ideal technical route for domestic CPUs."
Shi Jun, the CEO of Chaorui Technology, told 36Kr that from the perspective of specific products, the measured value of SPECint2006 of the first-generation RISC-V processor core of Chaorui Technology exceeds 10 points / GHz, and the performance indicator is at the leading level in the RISC-V industry. At the same time, Chaorui Technology is about to release a multi-core high-performance desktop-level CPU product that has been successfully taped out in Q1 of 2025.
In terms of technical reserves, the company's headquarters is located in Zhangjiang, Shanghai, and it has R & D centers in Changsha and Wuxi. The core members of the team all have more than 20 years of CPU R & D experience. CEO Shi Jun is a Ph.D. from the Computer Department of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He once served as the vice dean of the Software College of Shanghai Jiao Tong University and participated in the R & D of a national supercomputing system project. CTO Jiang Jiang is a Ph.D. from the Computer College of National University of Defense Technology. As a core backbone, he participated in the R & D of multiple generations of key projects of domestic high-performance CPUs and served as the chief architect of a leading company in the industry.
Investor Views:
Wang Yuanbo, the Managing Director of Hongtai Fund, said: The RISC-V architecture has now become one of the important choices for global open source standard chip design and embedded systems. Chaorui Technology has an excellent and top-notch technical team with rare high-performance CPU R & D capabilities in China. The performance of the fully self-developed core processor products can be comparable to international high-end products, and the product commercialization is already at the forefront of the industry; We believe and expect the further development of Chaorui Technology in the future.
Liu Lizhe, the partner of Longding Investment, said: Longding Investment began to pay attention to RISC-V technology as early as 2018, and it can be said that it is one of the earliest domestic investment institutions to focus on the RISC-V track. At present, the RISC-V architecture has been moving from "small and precise" to "large and comprehensive", expanding from the earliest focus on the low-power, low-cost embedded field to the current targeting of high-computing scenarios such as desktops, servers, cloud computing, AI and intelligent cockpits. Overall, the investment logic of RISC-V is gradually upgrading from an "alternative option" to an "innovation base". In the field of RISC-V high-performance CPUs, Longding Investment focuses on two points, technical leadership and the speed of scene landing; Chaorui Technology has solid technical capabilities and rich productization experience, and is one of the few teams in China that can perfectly meet the above two requirements. We continue to be optimistic about the future development of Chaorui Technology.
Hao Xudong, the founding partner of Sanhe Capital, pointed out: In the context of the accelerated process of semiconductor localization, the RISC-V architecture provides a new breakthrough to break the technical barriers. Chaorui Technology, with its deep optimization ability of the instruction set architecture, takes the lead in realizing the mass production and landing of high-performance multi-core chips. We particularly recognize the team's long-term investment in the underlying technology, and this system-level innovation ability will build a solid competitive barrier.