Ceva, Inc. (NASDAQ: CEVA) announced it has signed an AI intellectual property licensing agreement with an unnamed major U.S. software and AI platform company, under which the customer will use Ceva's NeuPro-M neural processing unit (NPU) as the foundation for a custom AI silicon program targeting next-generation intelligent computing devices.

According to a company press release, the agreement marks an expansion of Ceva's customer base beyond traditional semiconductor companies and device manufacturers to include software platform companies developing custom chips.

The customer selected NeuPro-M to provide AI acceleration for on-device inference workloads, including generative AI, multimodal AI, and agentic AI applications. Ceva said it worked with the customer to implement neural network optimizations tailored to the customer's specific AI workloads.

"We view this as one of the most strategically significant AI licensing agreements in Ceva's history," said Amir Panush, Chief Executive Officer of Ceva, adding that the deal reflects demand for AI acceleration that delivers high performance within strict power and thermal constraints.

The identity of the customer was not disclosed in the announcement. The financial terms of the agreement were also not disclosed.

Ceva is headquartered in Rockville, Maryland, and licenses silicon and software IP across consumer electronics, automotive, industrial IoT, and mobile markets. The company reports that more than 2 billion devices incorporating its technologies ship annually.