SiFive Inc. wants to give businesses access to custom-designed silicon chips at an affordable price, and today the San Francisco-based semiconductor startup announced that ii has closed an $8.5 million Series B funding round.

The round was led by Spark Capital, and it also included participation from Osage University Partners and existing investor Sutter Hill Ventures. SiFive’s Series B round brings the startup’s total investments to date to $13.5 million.

Founded in 2015 by the inventors of the open-source RISC-V semiconductor architecture, SiFive said its mission is to “democratize access to custom silicon.” The company does this through its Freedom Platforms, chips with flexible designs that allow businesses to choose the customizations and features they need for their chips without spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to license unique architectures.

SiFive’s Freedom Unleashed chip family is designed for use in machine learning, storage and networking applications, while its Freedom Everywhere family is designed for embedded microcontrollers, wearables and the Internet of Things.

“SiFive’s singular goal of putting custom chips into the hands of everyone from startups to exploratory design teams to inventors with a healthy crowdfunding campaign resonates with our core values,” said Todd Dagres, general partner at Spark Capital, who will join the SiFive board of directors. “We are excited at the potential for SiFive to enable new and emerging sectors to bring innovative solutions to market that might otherwise never see the light of day.”

SiFive said it has shipped more than 1,000 HiFive1 software development boards to developers in 40 countries around the world, and the company claims that it shipped the industry’s first RISC-V system on a chip platform in November. According to the company, more than 60 companies are now part of the RISC-V ecosystem, including Google, Nvidia and Microsoft.

“This investment will enable our continued growth for years to come, and will allow SiFive to further establish that alternatives really matter in an era where traditional silicon vendors no longer are the most innovative in the industry,” said Jack Kang, SiFive’s vice president of product and business development.

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