Chinese AI Chip Startup EVAS Intelligence Raises Nearly $280 Million, Valuation Jumps Tenfold Since April

Since EVAS Intelligence's Series B closed in April 2026 at a post-money valuation near RMB 1.5 billion, the Beijing-based chip startup has raised its price tag roughly tenfold in under half a year.

The company just closed a new round worth nearly RMB 2 billion, roughly $280 million, at a post-money valuation approaching RMB 15 billion, about $2.1 billion, according to Value Add VC and AngelLinx, both citing PANews and TechFlow Post. Dealroom put the figure slightly higher, at $275 million to $300 million and a $2.06 billion valuation, drawing on a partially overlapping investor list.

More than 20 investors participated. Value Add VC and AngelLinx name Huatai Innovation, Eastern Bell Capital, an SMIC-linked vehicle called Zhongxin Juyuan, Tongfu Microelectronics, 9F Medical, Sieyuan Industry Fund, Ren'ai Capital and several Beijing government-backed industrial funds. Dealroom lists a similar but not identical group, including Zhongding Capital and Andon Health. The round also follows a strategic investment from China Mobile made after the April Series B, per AngelLinx.

What EVAS Actually Builds

EVAS, founded in Guangzhou in January 2022 by Liu Hui, a 20-year semiconductor industry veteran who previously held China and Asia-Pacific roles at STMicroelectronics, Fujitsu Semiconductor, Cadence and Socionext, designs AI accelerator chips built on the open RISC-V instruction set, according to edgechat.ai. Its Epoch chip line pairs RISC-V cores with a self-developed vector extension and virtual instruction set called VISA, forming what the company calls the EVAMIND architecture, described as TPU-like with dual-systolic matrix engines.

The company says Epoch natively supports FP8 quantized compute and is designed to evolve toward FP4 formats used by Nvidia and other frontier chipmakers, per edgechat.ai's review of the company's own Series B materials. At the WAIC 2026 conference in July, EVAS unveiled what it called the industry's first RISC-V AI compute supernode, spanning chips, an interconnect it calls ELink, and liquid-cooled server clusters.

On revenue, the numbers come almost entirely from the company itself. Liu Hui has said EVAS's sales grew roughly 200% year over year, with more than RMB 1 billion in commercial order contracts secured by the time of the Series B, according to edgechat.ai. None of that has been independently verified by an outside auditor in the sources reviewed.

The Bigger Bet: Betting Against Nvidia's Moat

EVAS competes domestically with Horizon Robotics and other Chinese AI-silicon developers, all building against the same wall: U.S. export controls that restrict Chinese firms' access to Nvidia's most advanced chips and to the fabrication equipment needed to build comparable alternatives at home, according to Value Add VC.

The timing is notable. This round closed the same week Nscale filed for a U.S. IPO built around Nvidia's Vera Rubin chip deployments, and Crusoe closed a $3.9 billion round at a $30.9 billion valuation with Nvidia itself as a direct investor. Western AI infrastructure capital is concentrating around Nvidia at massive scale. Chinese capital is flowing into domestic alternatives at a fraction of the dollar volume, backed by state-linked funds whose bets don't depend purely on venture-style returns.

A RMB 15 billion valuation on a chip company whose commercial deployment at scale remains largely self-reported is a serious bet on a narrative, not just a product. Nvidia's CUDA software ecosystem and multi-generation hardware lead remain difficult to displace on pure technical merit, as Value Add VC notes.

The Epoch Times has reported a more skeptical read on the broader trend. Citing unnamed experts, the outlet reported on September 10 that Beijing's push for chip self-sufficiency risks deepening China's technological isolation, because gaps in manufacturing equipment and software remain difficult to overcome even as money pours in. That's a direct counterpoint to the framing in Value Add VC's coverage, which treats EVAS's fundraising cadence as evidence investors see a credible path to displacing Nvidia domestically. Both things can be true at once: state and private capital are flowing at real scale, and the underlying technology gap with Nvidia's ecosystem hasn't closed.

Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent said earlier this month that "nothing else matters" if China pulls ahead of the U.S. in AI, according to the Epoch Times, while U.S. agencies have separately accused six China-based AI companies of running large-scale distillation campaigns against American frontier models. These allegations remain unproven claims from named U.S. officials, not adjudicated findings.

What happens next is the open question. EVAS says its next-generation cloud chip has already taped out with several times the compute and interconnect performance of the first Epoch generation, according to AngelLinx. Whether that chip, or the first one, actually displaces Nvidia hardware inside a single major Chinese data center at production scale is something no source in this reporting has independently confirmed.