Moore Threads, a Chinese semiconductor player that develops graphics processing units (GPUs), has raised 1.5 billion yuan ($215.2 million) in a Series B round of financing, the startup announced on Tuesday.
China Mobile Digital New Economy Industry Fund, which is affiliated with the state-owned mobile telecommunication company China Mobile, and China’s domestic insurer Hexie Health Insurance jointly led the Series B round.
Dianshi Capital, an equity investment firm focusing on semiconductors, new energy, and intelligent manufacturing, participated in the round. Miracle Capital served as the financial adviser for the deal.
The fresh capital will fund the iteration of Moore Threads’ multipurpose GPUs, the innovation of its GPU architecture called “Moore Threads Unified System Architecture (MUSA),” and the R&D of related intellectual property (IP), said the startup in a press release.
Beijing-based Moore Threads has built a product portfolio including the most recently launched Chunxiao GPU architecture, which can be used for gaming, AI, and datacentre workloads.
The startup said that it has partnered with several original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to meet the purchase orders from large-scale state-backed companies in China, through which it is expected to deliver graphics cards to power over 10,000 made-in-China office laptops in the telecom and finance industries.
It also works with China Mobile and its state-owned counterpart China Telecom to explore the potential of applying multipurpose GPUs in cloud computing and metaverse infrastructures.
“Moore Threads has developed new-generation, multipurpose GPU products to target metacomputing and the next generation of the Internet. Its products integrate visual computing, AI computing, and other multidimensional, multi-component computing platforms, with the capacity to digitise daily office work, customer service, high-definition video processing, AI applications, and beyond,” said Lu Di, CEO of Miracle Capital, in the release.
The new financing marks the fourth venture deal completed by Moore Threads since its inception in October 2020. Its previous deal was a 2-billion-yuan ($286.9 million) Series A round from lead investors including Source Code Capital, Shanghai Guosheng Group, and BOC International’s Bohai Sheng (Hubei) Industrial Fund Management in November 2021.
In February 2021, the startup secured what it referred to as “billions of yuan” to reach a valuation of over $1 billion. Lead investors of the earlier round included China’s Shenzhen Capital Group, GGV Capital, and Sequoia Capital China. Sequoia China and 5Y Capital were among the investors of its angel round in December 2020.