中文翻译
摘要: Acquisition News
Latest News
Top Funding Rounds
Top Stories
The engineer who built Swift and LLVM sold his AI startup to Qualcomm for $4B
Abhinaya Prabhu
June 25, 2026
3 minute rea...
正文
Acquisition News
Latest News
Top Funding Rounds
Top Stories
The engineer who built Swift and LLVM sold his AI startup to Qualcomm for $4B
Abhinaya Prabhu
June 25, 2026
3 minute read
Image credits: Qualcomm
Qualcomm is acquiring Modular in an all-stock deal worth approximately $3.92 billion, announced at its investor day on June 24 and expected to close in the second half of 2026.
Modular was co-founded by Chris Lattner, the engineer who created LLVM and Apple’s Swift programming language: two pieces of infrastructure that most modern software now runs on.
The deal gives Qualcomm a vendor-neutral AI software platform already used by Oracle, Amazon, Nvidia, and AMD, and doubles Modular’s valuation from $1.6 billion just nine months ago.
Chris Lattner
has spent his career building the infrastructure the software world runs on, without most people ever knowing his name. LLVM, the compiler toolkit he created during his PhD at the University of Illinois in the early 2000s, now underpins software development toolchains at Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, and ARM. Swift, the programming language he started building in secret at Apple in 2010, is what millions of iOS developers write in every day.
Now his latest company,
, has been acquired by Qualcomm in an all-stock deal worth approximately $3.92 billion, and this time, the target is the software lock-in that has made Nvidia almost impossible to displace in AI.
The problem Lattner set out to fix
Lattner co-founded Modular in January 2022 alongside
Tim Davis
, after stints leading AI infrastructure work at Google’s TensorFlow team and heading engineering at RISC-V chip startup SiFive. Their starting point was a diagnosis most AI engineers quietly agree with: the software layer holding the industry together is a mess. Developers building AI applications have to optimise their code separately for each chip architecture a costly duplication of effort that
采集时间: 2026-06-25 20:16:30
AI创业公司融资人工智能