Silicon Valley 5G chip startup EdgeQ Inc has raised $75 million in funding to ramp up production as the company starts selling its technology to customers, including telecom operators.

It also announced that Lattice Semiconductor Corp CEO Jim Anderson is joining EdgeQ's board of directors.

“EdgeQ makes semiconductors that power base stations for 5G telecom towers and for 5G access points that can be installed inside places like factories to run robots and autonomous vehicles wirelessly. The chips can also handle 4G cellular signals,” says Vinay Ravuri, chief executive officer and cofounder of EdgeQ.

“WiFi is considered best effort, meaning it isn't guaranteed. If it's a precise welding machine and it needs to move exactly this much, that has to happen within a microsecond or a millisecond, and you can't do that in a best effort way,” adds Ravuri.

The fundraising shows that companies viewed as promising by investors are able to secure financing even though funding has dried up for many startups following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and the ensuing banking sector turmoil in March.

“The recent advent of a new open standard chip architecture called RISC-V has made it possible to design its new 5G chip more cost effectively. That has helped EdgeQ bring down the base station cost by about 50 percent compared with existing options today,” says Ravuri.

EdgeQ, started in 2018, builds products that are based on OpenRAN, an open standards body that allows operators to mix and match suppliers in their radio networks, emerging as a competitor to the likes of Ericsson, Huawei, and Nokia that dominate the global telecoms equipment market with their proprietary technologies.