State of Marketing: RISC-V
RISC-V chip shown below a market surface line — detailed circuit visible below, pixelated above, illustrating the RISC-V commercial visibility gap.
RISC-V is making great strides.
Here’s how to make sure the market knows it.
RISC-V Summit Europe just wrapped in Bologna. If you were there, you already felt the momentum. If you weren't, the signal is the same: this ecosystem is moving. NVIDIA ships over a billion RISC-V cores across its GPU products. Qualcomm has more than 650 million in Snapdragon. SiFive counts two billion devices powered by the ISA it helped create. The open standard once dismissed as a niche academic project is now embedded in the infrastructure of AI.
Speaking fresh from his opening keynote, RISC-V International CEO Andrea Gallo points to a confluence of factors making 2026 a genuine turning point: growing investment across the ecosystem, the ratification of the RISC-V Server Platform specification, and real RVA23 silicon that is shifting RISC-V from "inevitable" to "now."
But if now is the moment, the technical momentum isn't the issue. The issue is whether the commercial narrative is keeping pace with it.
We spent the last month auditing the marketing and content presence of every full member of RISC-V International — 27 companies across Premier and Strategic tiers. What we found is a sector with genuine technical credibility and a significant, largely untapped opportunity to convert that credibility into a commercial pipeline.
The range is wide. The highest score across the cohort was 62 out of 100, and a number of companies are genuinely punching above their weight — building strong content with lean teams and getting the technical story in front of the right audiences. What's encouraging is that the companies with the most headroom also have the most to gain, and in most cases the fixes don't require a single new hire.
It's worth saying that these aren't scores against some idealised benchmark. They reflect what's achievable with the resources most companies in this space are working with. The companies at the top of the range are doing this well under real constraints.
What's consistent across the cohort is a shared set of quick wins that show up regardless of company size, funding stage, or geography. The companies already acting on them are pulling ahead fast.
What the audit found
Five patterns stood out across almost every site.
1. The comparison conversation is up for grabs
Every buyer in this ecosystem — evaluating processor IP, development tools, or silicon infrastructure — will at some point search "RISC-V versus Arm" or compare two vendors directly. Those searches carry the highest commercial intent in the category. Right now, they mostly resort to third-party editorial: EE Times, AnandTech, Stack Overflow. The opportunity to own those conversations is wide open, and the companies that move first will define how the category is understood.
2. Proof points deserve more than a press release
Shipped volumes, funded amounts, customer wins — these numbers are the commercial backbone of any deep tech company's credibility. The quick win here is giving them a permanent home. A dedicated page with context, citations, and a narrative holds onto search authority indefinitely rather than fading after a few weeks. It's consistently one of the highest-return moves we identified.
3. The hub page is often missing
For many companies in the cohort, the content is already there — it's just distributed across product sub-pages and developer portals on separate subdomains. Consolidating it around a single hub page is one of the fastest ways to see outsized returns from work that's already been done.
4. Partnerships get announced. They rarely get capitalised
A hyperscaler co-marketing deal or a Tier 1 OEM partnership is a landmark moment — and it creates a keyword cluster that could drive qualified traffic for years. The companies getting the most from this treat each partnership as a content asset to keep building on. A handful of members have cracked this, and the traffic differential versus peers is significant.
5. Developer documentation is a double-edged asset
Technical documentation is often the most authoritative content a company produces — and in this ecosystem it frequently lives on a separate subdomain. Every Stack Overflow citation, every GitHub reference, every developer forum link builds authority that doesn't feed back to the commercial site. The fix isn't to merge documentation into the main site — it's to create deliberate bridges between the two.
Why the next 18 months matter
RISC-V has proven its place. What happens now is about visibility and commercial translation — which companies can make their proposition legible to enterprise procurement teams, to non-specialist investors, to the partner ecosystem that determines distribution at scale.
The companies in this ecosystem that build their content and credibility infrastructure now will be the ones that define how the category is understood — by buyers, by investors, and by the press. The technical story is already there. The marketing resource to carry it is established.
That's the RISC-V marketing opportunity. It's measurable, it's consistent across the cohort, and for the companies already doing well on the technical side, it's the natural next move.
Latent works with deep tech companies to build the marketing credibility that makes complex technical propositions commercially legible. Curious where your company landed in the audit? A few scored higher than they expected — and the gaps that did show up were often simpler to address than assumed. If you'd like to compare notes or discuss how to close the gap, get in touch. We'd love to talk.