CEVA, Inc. (CEVA)

Overview

CEVA, Inc. is a semiconductor and software intellectual property (IP) licensing company that designs "Physical AI" technology — silicon IP and software embedded directly into billions of edge devices — spanning wireless connectivity, sensing, and on-device AI inference. As of fiscal year 2025 (period ended December 31, 2025), CEVA employed 424 people (311 in R&D), generated trailing-twelve-month revenue of $115.7 million, and carried a market capitalization of roughly $908 million as of September 2026, despite reporting a net loss of $11.0 million for the period. The company is not currently profitable on a GAAP basis but holds a genuinely dominant position within specific IP niches, most notably wireless connectivity.

What They Do & How They Make Money

CEVA does not manufacture chips; instead, it licenses reusable silicon IP cores, platforms, and software to semiconductor companies and OEMs, who integrate CEVA's designs into their own chips. Revenue comes from two streams: licensing and related revenue (upfront fees for IP cores, platforms, software, and development tools, representing about 58% of 2025 revenue) and royalty revenue (per-unit or percentage-of-sales fees earned every time a licensee ships a chip containing CEVA's IP, about 42% of 2025 revenue) — a model that scales without CEVA bearing manufacturing capital costs, but that also means near-term revenue depends heavily on the design-win and royalty-ramp cycle of its customers' own chip programs.

Product Portfolio

Competitors

• Arm, the dominant CPU-core IP licensor, competing broadly across CEVA's target markets with far greater scale and brand recognition.
• Cadence and VeriSilicon, offering competing DSP and IP-core platforms.
• Imagination Technologies, competing in graphics and certain processing IP niches.
• In-house chip design teams at large semiconductor manufacturers such as NXP, STMicroelectronics, and Broadcom, which can choose to build comparable capability internally rather than license from CEVA.

Competitive Position

CEVA's strongest asset is its outright leadership in wireless connectivity IP — a 68% global market share figure that reflects years of design wins now generating royalty streams across hundreds of customers, including publicly disclosed relationships with MediaTek, Qualcomm, NXP, Samsung, Sony, and Intel. Once a customer designs CEVA's IP into a chip, replacing it requires a costly, multi-year silicon redesign cycle, giving CEVA meaningfully higher switching costs than most software businesses — design wins essentially lock in years of downstream royalty revenue. The company's heavy customer concentration in China (62% of 2025 revenue) and reliance on international sales (82% of revenue) introduce geopolitical and trade-policy risk that could disrupt this otherwise durable royalty base. CEVA also faces the ever-present threat that its largest customers (major chipmakers) could bring IP development in-house given sufficient scale, and it competes against Arm's far larger ecosystem and resources across some overlapping categories. Still, with seven of the top ten MCU vendors already using CEVA technology and a clear #1 position in a specific, hard-to-replicate connectivity IP niche, CEVA occupies a genuinely differentiated position within the broader, more competitive semiconductor-IP landscape.

Sources

• CEVA, Inc. 10-K, fiscal year ended December 31, 2025 (SEC EDGAR)
• CEVA, Inc. (CEVA) Stock Overview — StockAnalysis.com