Beijing-based AI chip startup EVAS Intelligence closed a financing round of nearly RMB 2 billion (approximately $295 million USD) on September 18, with a post-money valuation of nearly RMB 15 billion (approximately $2.21 billion USD). More than 20 institutional investors participated, including lead backers Huatai Innovation, Eastern Bell Capital, and Zhongxin Juyuan, a fund linked to SMIC. EVAS's core product, the Epoch series, is built on the RISC-V ISA and the RISC-V Vector extension (RVV), with the internally developed fifth-generation RISC-V DSA, EVAMIND, following a TPU-style approach in which embedded RISC-V cores manage data flow, runtime scheduling, and memory management rather than serving as compute engines. The Epoch chip natively supports block-quantized FP8 precision, which EVAS says makes it China's first RISC-V cloud chip to reach this milestone, and the next generation extends to EXFP4 and MXFP4 four-bit microscaling formats, a roadmap already taped out. RISC-V International, the Swiss nonprofit governing RISC-V, relocated from the United States to Switzerland in 2019, citing the reason explicitly.