[8] In 2015, researchers Krste Asanović, Yunsup Lee, and Andrew Waterman from the University of California Berkeley founded SiFive.

[10] In October the same year, SiFive did a limited release of its U54-MC, which was reported to be the first RISC-V based 64-bit quad-core CPU that supported comprehensive operating systems like Linux.

[11][12] In June 2018, SiFive acquired Open-Silicon for an undisclosed amount and retained their application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) design capabilities.

[15] In April 2021, the company also taped out its first system-on-chip on TSMC's N5 process technology, making it the first RISC-V-based device to be made using a 5 nm node.

[16] In June 2021,[17] Canonical announced its Ubuntu operating system supports the HiFive Unmatched and HiFive Unleashed, and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center collaborated with Codeplay Software and SiFive to implement support for the RISC-V V-extension v0.10 in the LLVM compilation infrastructure, providing vector computation capabilities through C/C++ intrinsics.

[27] In January 2020, SiFive hired Chris Lattner, an American software engineer best known as the main author of LLVM and related projects such as the Clang compiler and the Swift programming language.

[28] In August 2020, SiFive received $60 million in a Series E funding round[29] led by investors SK Hynix and Saudi Aramco.

[38] In March 2022, SiFive received $175 million in a Series F funding round led by Coatue Management, valuing the company at over $2.5 billion.

SiFive reiterated their commitment to existing products and lines and stated that the company is "well funded for years in the future and continue to work".