Startup Funding: January 2023


Quantum computing had a good month in January, collectively raising over $240 million. A significant chunk of that went to a full-stack quantum company whose processers use neutral atoms manipulated by optical tweezers. Other companies funded this month are developing trapped ion processors, photonics-based processors, and quantum memories, which will be essential for quantum networking. Two co... » read more

Chip Industry Startup Funding Annual Report & Analysis: 2022


Introduction New ideas fuel the semiconductor industry, and money enables those ideas. Tracking what startups get funded is one way to see which ideas are more viable and which problems need to be solved most urgently. In general, the more startups working on a solution to a particular problem, the greater the need for a viable solution — and the more likely one will be developed. Investo... » read more

Startup Funding: December 2022


The month of December saw six rounds of $100 million or more. The largest, at a massive half-billion dollars, will support manufacturing of 12-inch monocrystalline silicon polished wafers and epitaxial wafers in China. The company is aiming for a production rate of 1 million pieces a month when current expansion is completed. Also in the half-billion club last month is a company making auton... » read more

Startup Funding: November 2022


November was a month for mega-rounds, with ten companies receiving investments of at least $100 million. One of those is a startup providing connectivity solutions for data centers and enabling use of the memory pooling functionality in the latest update to the CXL standard. Two quantum computer startups were part of the $100M+ club this month — one using very cold atoms to take on not only q... » read more

Startup Funding: October 2022


Investors poured $3.5 billion into 113 startup companies in October 2022, especially new battery technology, AI hardware, and faster memory access. Battery technology dominated the fundraising in October thanks to the U.S. Department of Energy and four funding rounds that exceeded $200M. The DOE awarded sizeable grants to help 20 companies, including six startups, build out battery material ... » read more

Startup Funding: September 2022


The onshoring and buildout of dozens of fabs, many costing tens of billions of dollars, is beginning to spill over into other areas that are critical for chip manufacturing. Materials, in particular, which often gets little attention outside of chip manufacturing, witnessed a big spike in September 2022. In fact, seven materials companies covered in this report made up more than a third of the ... » read more

Cybord: Electronic Component Traceability


Counterfeit electronics is a multibillion-dollar industry worldwide. The challenge is finding them, and this is where Israeli startup Cybord is working to gain a foothold. The company has developed an AI-driven solution that checks for counterfeit parts during product assembly. “It's a huge task to check electronic components, said Cybord CEO Zeev Efrat. "It's not capacitors only, or resis... » read more

Startup Funding: August 2022


Investors funneled $1.9 billion into startups last month. The total was down from the previous few months for companies tracked by Semiconductor Engineering, but still a strong showing for the chip industry and related technologies. By market segment, power devices were a bright spot in August's funding, with 12 companies receiving new financing rounds. A manufacturer of multilayer ceramic c... » read more

CogniFiber: Photonic Computing


Computing with light has many advantages. It's fast, cheap, and it doesn't generate much heat. But it's also difficult to make it work, and it has a number of challenges that are specific to photonics. CogniFiber, an Israeli startup, says it has solved many of these issues. The company uses photonics over fiber, and it has introduced a glass-based chip. “We use light as a data conveyor ... » read more

Startup Funding: July 2022


Quantum computing may seem like a futuristic technology, but computation based on superposition and entanglement is here and investors are eager to get behind it. Two of July's rounds that passed the $100 million mark were for superconducting quantum processor companies, one of which is also developing EDA software to assist in designing quantum circuits. And it's not just mega-rounds. Two quan... » read more

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