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.

Is the UK exporting all it’s innovation?

We spent the day at CWTEC26, Cambridge Wireless's annual event, listening to the people building the UK's semiconductor industry. Charles Sturman from TechWorks opened with the numbers, and they're worth recounting. UK semiconductor companies generate around £11bn in direct revenue, about 2% of the global market. Three hundred companies work directly on chip design and manufacture. Another four hundred are doing semiconductor-adjacent development. Roughly 27,000 people are employed in the sector, and it's backed by a strong university research base and a startup and spinout culture that keeps producing new companies worth watching.

None of that is small. But it's also not where it could be, and the reason isn't a lack of ideas.

The UK is great at the early part of the journey. It's where a lot of the world's most interesting semiconductor and photonics IP still gets invented, in university labs in Cambridge, Manchester, and beyond, then carried out into spinouts by people who've spent a decade or more on the underlying science. Paragraf is a good example. Their graphene process came out of research at the University of Manchester in 2004, and it took until 2018 for that discovery to become a company, and years more to build the manufacturing capability to actually produce anything at volume. Their COO - Tony Pearce talked candidly at CWTEC about how much slower and more expensive the build was in the UK compared to somewhere like the US, where capital and complementary companies are easier to find.

That's the pattern we keep seeing. A technology survives years of research, funding rounds, and the genuinely hard work of turning a lab discovery into something manufacturable. By the time it's close to contributing to that £11bn figure, an enormous amount has already been spent getting it there. Custom Interconnect's John Boston put the wider problem well when he talked about the UK's tendency to invent the technology and then treat manufacturing as something beneath it, work that gets sent elsewhere once the hard science is done. The result is that most of the value created in UK labs ends up being captured overseas, by whoever picks up the manufacturing and the commercial relationship once the risky part is finished.

You can see the same shape in SCI Semiconductor's CHERI work, for different reasons. Haydn Povey highlighted that memory safety vulnerabilities were first identified in 1972 and are still one of the most common routes into modern systems, costing an estimated $10.5 trillion a year globally, according to McKinsey. CHERI, developed through years of UK university research and Ministry of Defence and GCHQ-backed funding, closes off most of that risk at the architecture level rather than patching it after the fact, and Google's own testing found it improves performance rather than costing anything for the added security. With the EU's Cyber Resilience Act now in force and the UK government committing £26m to CHERI adoption, the timing for this kind of technology is about as good as it gets. It's a strong illustration of just how much can go right on the fundamentals of a UK deep tech story, decades of research, real funding, strong regulatory tailwind, and still leave the hardest part of the journey, getting it adopted at scale, still ahead.

That's really the point. None of this is about the UK lacking good technology. It has plenty. The risk sits in the last stretch, after the science works and the manufacturing is built, when what's needed is a clear proposition and a pipeline that turns capability into adoption. Get that wrong, or leave it too late, and a technology that's already cost years and millions to develop can lose momentum right at the point it was supposed to start paying that investment back.

Given how much has already gone into a technology by the time it reaches that stage, treating the commercial side as an afterthought is the most expensive mistake a UK deep tech company can make. It's usually the smallest remaining piece of the journey, and the one most likely to determine whether everything before it was worth it.

This is the part of the journey we work in. Not manufacturing, and not the underlying science, but making sure the story, positioning, and pipeline are in place before a technology needs them, so the UK doesn't do the hard part brilliantly and then lose the value at the finish line. If that gap sounds familiar, it's worth a conversation.