Ceva

A business model with no name on the box: licensing without manufacturing

Ceva does not make chips and does not sell them to the end customer. What it sells are "cores": ready-made designs for signal processing, neural processing and wireless communication, which other chipmakers build into their own products. Revenue comes from upfront license fees and royalties based on the number of chips actually shipped. The result: according to the company, its technology is already built into more than 21 billion devices, but its name is almost unknown to the general public. It simply does not appear on any product box.

NeuPro: running a model without leaving the device

The NeuPro family of cores are neural processing units (NPUs): a dedicated hardware component for running neural networks inside the chip of an edge device, without sending the data to the cloud. In the second quarter of 2026 the company reported that its NeuPro-M generation had been chosen by a leading global computing and AI company to design a next-generation custom AI chip. This extends its customer base to a new layer of customers who control both the hardware and the operating system. Alongside this, the company licenses intellectual property for wireless communication: Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, UWB and 5G.

Origins: a merger of Israel's DSP Group and Ireland's Parthus

Ceva was formed in November 2002 from a merger between the intellectual property licensing division of the Israeli company DSP Group and the Irish company Parthus Technologies. The original name, ParthusCeva, was shortened to Ceva in December 2003. The company's headquarters is now registered in the United States (Rockville, Maryland), but it originated in the Israeli operation, and English Wikipedia still classifies it as an Israeli chip company. The company trades on Nasdaq under the symbol CEVA; in 2025 its revenue came to about $109.6 million, and it had 424 employees.

Second quarter of 2026: growth in licensing revenue

According to the company's official earnings release, in the second quarter of 2026 Ceva recorded total revenue of $29 million, up 13% from the same period a year earlier, while licensing revenue climbed 21% to $18.2 million, the highest in three years. In that quarter the company signed ten licensing agreements, including two with new customers and two directly with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). CEO Amir Panush linked the improvement to "the growing strategic importance of proven silicon and software IP" as customers adopt increasingly complex AI and connectivity technologies.

Why a veteran chip company ended up at the center of the AI market

Ceva falls into this category under a defined exception: artificial intelligence is not its whole business, but it is a long-standing player in the infrastructure that makes it possible to run models on edge devices. Signal processing components originally developed for mobile phones and cameras turned out to be a convenient infrastructure for running small neural networks as well. This is an example of how much of the technological infrastructure that consumer AI relies on came many years before it, and was not built specially for it.