Imagination Technologies sold off MIPS in 2017 [1] - while RISC-V might have been a thing back then, it was certainly nowhere as known as it is today, and well before any decision to focus on RISC-V.
Interesting in that Imagination have since announced RISC-V cores [2], but that's unrelated to any of the MIPS tech, and none of the MIPS engineers worked on it as the project started well after the sale.
