Startup Funding: June 2023


June saw several large funding rounds, with seven of at least $100 million. Over half a billion dollars alone went to a Chinese company manufacturing silicon carbide (SiC) power semiconductors. The wide band gap material has seen steady interest from investors, particularly for its potential use in electric vehicles. Another of the month's mega-rounds went to a company designing RISC-V SoCs ... » read more

Startup Funding: May 2023


Photonic interconnects were an area of activity in May, with two companies raising funds for what could be much faster chip-to-chip and chiplet-to-chiplet links. Microstructured optics and metasurfaces also drew investment, with four companies creating products for a range of applications from flexible LEDs to multi-wavelength spectral imaging. The large language models that power many gener... » read more

Startup Funding: April 2023


Packaging was a hot spot in April, with one of the largest rounds going to a middle-end-of-line advanced packaging company. A second packaging company also drew significant funding for its focus on wafer-level packaging for CMOS image sensors. Two packaging substrate manufacturers also saw investment. Two photoresist makers also drew sizeable rounds. Both they and the packaging companies are... » read more

Startup Funding: March 2023


Funding was broadly spread between sectors in March, with automotive edging ahead thanks to a more than $100 million round for a company manufacturing electric, autonomous heavy commercial trucks for freight logistics. To keep up with the amount of information presented by cars and ADAS, several companies raised funds for head-up displays with increasing levels of detail and expanded fields of ... » 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: 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

Startup Funding: May 2022


May was another strong month for China as it continues its push to build a native semiconductor ecosystem. Over half the month's total funding went to startups in the country. Over half the companies funded were from China as well, including two FPGA companies, three making CPUs, a GPU startup, and numerous networking and wireless chip companies. Two of those, in FPGAs and CPUs, raised rounds s... » read more

Startup Funding: September 2020


It was a good month for startups, with big rounds in automotive, data centers, and AI. A new startup with big backing is taking aim at energy inefficiency in the data center, and another is looking to make the industrial IoT battery-free. SK Hynix founded a new company to analyze semiconductor manufacturing data, and one of China's EV companies sees a massive cash infusion. This month, we look ... » read more