More than half are domestic companies! In February, 95 global electronics companies received a total of US$3 billion in investment

Megarounds (known in Silicon Valley as “megarounds”) dominated venture funding in February, with 10 companies receiving $100 million or more, including five companies with more than $200 million. The automotive industry was the biggest winner, with seven of the 10 companies involved in developing ADAS and autonomous driving, manufacturing electric vehicles, or making auto parts. The largest round in February, at nearly $500 million, went to a producer of power semiconductor devices for automotive and other applications. All told, companies involved in the automotive market in some way received more than $2 billion, or about two-thirds of the total disclosed that month. That doesn’t include the $1.35 billion raised by Cruise, GM’s self-driving company. Another area that stood out was AI hardware. Notably, each of the six companies has a unique take on the architecture of building a good AI system, from photonics and fiber-optic computing to simulation. Also included were design services, flexible electronics, inspection equipment, DRAM, and a new Chinese EDA company.

According to statistics, these 95 companies raised a total of more than US$3 billion in February.

Semiconductors and Design

Design services company Semifive has raised $109 million in Series B funding from BonAngels, Game Changer, Korea Investment Partners, LB Investment, Mirae Asset Venture Investment, and Pavilion Capital. The startup uses Samsung Foundry to provide platform-based custom design services for AI, edge, AIoT, and data acceleration SoCs, with plans to expand into HPC and automotive. It uses templates and IP libraries designed to reduce the cost and time required to create custom chips. The funds will be used for R&D, hiring, and developing intellectual property. "With the strong support of our investors, we are accelerating our strategy in the United States, which is key to business expansion and increasing capabilities. We are expanding our sales, customer, and technical support organizations," said Brandon Cho, CEO and founder of Semifive. Founded in 2019 and headquartered in Seongnam, South Korea, Semifive has raised $147 million to date.

Silang Technology has raised $100 million in Series C financing from Tianfeng Tianrui, CICC Capital, Chipone and old shareholder Yuanyi Investment. Silang Technology's self-developed architecture MaPU's multiple ultra-high-performance computing chips, 5G communication baseband chips, video enhancement chips, etc. have all been successfully taped out and entered the commercial delivery stage. Silang Technology's competitiveness lies in its self-developed MaPU architecture. It is understood that domain-customized architectures and domain-customized programming languages ​​are regarded by academia and industry as new directions for improving processor performance in the future. According to the company's official website, the MaPU architecture can combine the efficiency of ASIC, the reconfigurability of FPGA, and the flexibility of CPU. Silang Technology was founded in 2016 and is headquartered in Beijing.

Yunhe Zhiwang has completed a Pre-A+ round of financing of over 400 million yuan, led by Haisong Capital, followed by LFC, Chaos Investment, Yinshengtai Capital, Xiaoshan Development Zone Industrial Fund, China Merchants Securities, Zhongguancun Xinchuang Fund, Share Investment, and Huagai Capital. Old shareholders such as Qianhai Mother Fund, Huoshui Capital, Linxin Capital, and Jinshajiang Capital continue to increase their investment. Yunhe Zhiwang was founded in November 2020 and is committed to the research and development of high-performance programmable Ethernet switch chips and solutions, creating underlying hardware and customized software that conforms to the cloud native ecosystem, and serving global Internet manufacturers, large, medium and small enterprises, and operators to build the next generation of new networks and data centers. The funds will be used for research and development, product commercialization, and recruitment. The headquarters is located in Hangzhou.

Lisuan Technology has obtained hundreds of millions of yuan in angel round financing. Investors include Datai Capital, Jiangmen Venture Capital, Wanwu Venture Capital, Haisong Capital, and Xieli Venture Capital. The funds will be used for the company's self-developed Pangu mechanism's first-generation GPU (graphics processing unit) chip product development, team expansion, etc. Lisuan Technology was founded in August 2021 by industry-leading experts with more than 20 years of experience in leading GPU chip research and development. It claims to develop a truly domestic alternative to TrueGPU, focusing mainly on self-developed architecture and proprietary intellectual property rights. It is building domestic GPU chips that benchmark international mainstream products, serving the domestic 180 billion rendering GPU full-range market, and realizing high-performance graphics rendering on the end, cloud, and edge. Headquartered in Nanjing.

Menta has received a €7.5 million (~$8.5 million) loan from the European Investment Bank to support its growth and development. Menta provides standard cell embedded FPGA IP for SoC, ASIC or ASSP designs. eFPGA IP is available as soft RTL or hard GDSII IP, supporting a wide range of foundry processes. A tool chain is provided to generate bitstreams from RTL, including synthesis. Menta was founded in 2007 and is headquartered in Sophia-Antipolis, France.

Common Mode Semiconductor has obtained tens of millions of RMB in Pre-A round of financing, led by the Park Science and Technology Innovation Fund and Yuanhe Holdings, and followed by investment institutions such as Wuyuefeng Science and Technology Innovation, Suzhou Science and Technology Innovation, and Shenzhen Debi. The funds will be mainly used to introduce core talents and accelerate the completion of the research and development and construction of early product lines. Common Mode Semiconductor was established in February 2021 and is mainly committed to the research and development and sales of high-performance analog circuits, including RF integrated circuits, analog-to-digital converters, analog power supplies, protection devices, high-performance mixed-signal SoCs and other chips and application solutions, which can be widely used in industry, power, communications, automobiles, medical and security and other fields. Headquartered in Suzhou, China.

Ozark Integrated Circuits has received a $200,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop a high-temperature health monitoring instrument to measure the state of molten salts used in molten salt-cooled nuclear reactors. Ozark IC will use silicon carbide (SiC) and gold materials to manufacture non-reactive probes with temperature cycling durability in the range of 500°C to 800°C (930⁰F to 1500⁰F). It will also manufacture the analog front end of the measuring instrument. The company provides circuit boards, ICs, sensors, packaging and consulting services focused on extreme environments. Founded in 2011, it is headquartered in Fayetteville, Arkansas, USA.

Ayar Labs received a strategic investment from Hewlett Packard Pathfinder. Ayar Labs' silicon photonics chip technology can use optical signals to replace copper wires as signal interconnects between chips (also known as optical I/O). Compared with current I/O technologies, it has the advantages of high bandwidth, low latency and low power consumption, and can realize new heterogeneous, disaggregated computing system designs and unified memory architectures. HPE and Ayar Labs will collaborate in photonics research and commercial development, including the establishment of a joint ecosystem involving solution providers and customers. The focus of this collaboration is to develop Ayar Labs' high-speed, high-density, low-power optical interconnect technology and provide support for future generations of HPE Slingshot. Ayar Labs is headquartered in Emeryville, California, USA, and was founded in 2015.

MuChuang Integrated Circuit has completed its A1 round of financing, which was led by China Electronics Research and Investment Fund, followed by Dekai Yuantai and old shareholders Tsinghua Holdings Ginkgo and Lishi Venture Capital. It is reported that this round of financing will be mainly used for the large-scale delivery of MuChuang's reconfigurable security chips and intelligent network controller chips. Wuxi MuChuang was established in 2018 and originated from the reconfigurable computing security team of Tsinghua University. Wuxi MuChuang focuses on the development of reconfigurable programming system chip application systems, chip front-end design, and testing services. It adheres to the product development route of "national secret integration security, security integration network, network integration intelligence", and has two major product series for information security and network control. It is determined to become a provider of reconfigurable security acceleration and intelligent network controller chips for cloud, network, and terminal.

AI Hardware

Celestial AI was led by Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT), with participation from Temasek's Xora Innovation Fund, The Engine, a venture capital company spun out from MIT, Tyche Partners, Merck's corporate venture fund M-Ventures, IMEC XPand, and Princeton University ecosystem venture capitalist Fitz Gate. Celestial AI's Photonic Fabric enables optically addressable memory and computing (within and between chips), allowing its technology to transcend the limitations of electronic devices and the increasingly ineffective Moore's Law. The company's proprietary architecture supports streamlined, low-complexity system software that enables efficient mapping of data and computing without complex optimizations. Driven by Photonic Fabric, the technology of accessing virtually unlimited memory and computing through light will gradually become popular, and this software advantage can be extended to multi-chip exascale systems. "We are solving the problem of the computing age - efficient data transmission," said David Lazovsky, founder and CEO of Celestial AI. "Celestial AI's hybrid photonic-electronic platform enables us to leverage the complementary strengths of optics and electronics to achieve high-performance, high-precision computing and photons to achieve high-speed, low-power, high-bandwidth data transmission. This enables us to achieve a revolutionary performance advantage over purely electronic systems. Machine learning applications will benefit not only from performance and low power consumption, but also from low latency, user-friendly software, and lower total cost of ownership. As the complexity of AI models increases, our differentiated competitive advantage will increase over time, driving higher-speed data transmission." The new funds will be used to expand the global engineering team, product development, and establish close relationships with strategic suppliers including Broadcom to build the company's Orion AI accelerator products. Celestial AI aims to fundamentally change the way computing is done with a new type of processing system based on its proprietary Photonic Fabric™ technology platform, which uses light to enable data transmission within and between chips. Celestial AI was founded in 2020 and is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, USA.