Analyst: Qualcomm’s Ventana Acquisition Helps Fill Gap Left By Nuvia Founder Exits

A semiconductor industry analyst explains how Qualcomm’s Ventana Micro Systems acquisition likely fills a leadership gap left by the recent departures of two engineering executives who have been key to the chip designer’s custom CPU strategy.

While Qualcomm is losing two engineering executives who have been key to its custom CPU strategy, an analyst said the company should be able to fill the leadership gap with its recent acquisition of chip design startup Ventana Micro Systems.

The two engineering executives, Gerard Williams and John Bruno, were two of the three founders of the Nuvia chip startup Qualcomm acquired nearly five years ago to boost its Arm CPU capabilities so that it could, among other things, take new swings at the PC and server markets after previous efforts failed to catch traction.

Both Williams and Bruno announced Monday on LinkedIn that they left Qualcomm at the end of January. Williams, Nuvia’s former CEO, was a senior vice president of engineering while Bruno held the title of vice president of engineering.

A Qualcomm spokesperson told CRN that it doesn’t comment on personnel matters.

At Qualcomm, they worked together on Oryon, the custom, Arm-compatible CPU core architecture they started developing at Nuvia. The San Diego, Calif.-based company has used the custom Oryon CPU designs to boost its leadership capabilities across multiple markets. These efforts include Snapdragon X Series processors that debuted in 2024 and a server CPU product whose development began at Nuvia.

Ian Cutress, chief analyst at semiconductor specialist firm More Than Moore, told CRN on Tuesday that while Williams had been the face of the Nuvia team as its former CEO, Bruno played a more active role with Oryon’s developments in recent times. As a result, he said he was more surprised about Bruno leaving than Williams.

“While Gerard had been the face, I know that John Bruno had been, from my perspective, a little bit more proactive about all the exact numbers and everything that’s going on between product lines and SKUs,” he said in an interview.

It’s not uncommon for executives from acquisitions to leave companies, including Intel, after their shares vest, said Cutress. It’s unclear if that was a factor in this situation.

How Ventana’s Team Can Help Fill The Leadership Gap

Regardless of the reasons they left, Cutress said he doesn’t think that the departures of Williams and Bruno will necessarily create a leadership gap for Qualcomm’s CPU team.

That’s because Qualcomm last December acquired another chip design startup, Ventana Micro Systems. While the startup was focused on the development of high-performance CPU cores based on RISC-V—a competing instruction set architecture to Arm—Qualcomm’s goal with the acquisition was more likely to expand its Oryon CPU team, according to the analyst.

In other words, Cutress doesn’t think Qualcomm intends to develop a separate track of RISC-V processors that would compete with its Arm-compatible designs.

And he rejected the idea that Qualcomm acquired Ventana to use the startup’s RISC-V technology as a hedge against its current road map in the face of its legal battle with Arm, which last September vowed to appeal a judge’s final ruling in Qualcomm’s favor.

Cutress did, however, allow for the possibility that Qualcomm could use Ventana’s RISC-V technology for microcontrollers or an aspect of a server platform.

“It felt like Qualcomm would have to invest just as much as they had in Nuvia in order to build something around the Ventana Micro IP to get it to a point where it would be equivalent. And that just didn’t make sense,” he said.

“Why would you go and acquire a company that would build something that would compete with your main, advertised products—and the one that’s going to lead your architecture for the next 10 years?” Cutress added.

Plus, despite Ventana’s focus on RISC-V, Cutress said the startup’s leadership team likely has more experience with designing Arm-based chips.

“Some of the leadership of Ventana was actually involved back in the day of defining the Arm standards for servers,” he said.

Cutress also pointed out how Qualcomm’s own announcement about the Ventana acquisition said that the startup’s team would “complement Qualcomm’s existing efforts to develop custom Oryon CPU technology.”

“They’re increasing the pervasiveness of the Oryon core. And to do that, you need to grow a team. The easiest way to grow a team is an acqui-hire of sorts,” he said.