China’s Semi-Tech, which offers computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM) solutions to the semiconductor industry, announced on Friday that it has closed over 500 million yuan ($72.3 million) in a Series C round of financing led by Matrix Partners China.
The Series C round brought the firm’s post-money valuation to over 6 billion yuan ($868 million), said Semi-Tech in an official statement.
The deal marks the fifth funding round that it has completed over the past two years or so, said the firm. It has also kick-started fundraising work for a Series C+ round amid strong interest from “multiple well-known investment institutions.”
Yangtze River Delta G60 Science & Technology Innovation Fund, a 10-billion-yuan ($1.4 billion) fund backed by multiple governments in eastern China’s Yangtze River Delta, participated in the Series C round.
Several other domestic companies also backed the deal, such as Camel Equity Investment Fund and Hangzhou Lion Electronics, a publicly-listed manufacturer of semiconductor wafers and other chip components. Existing shareholder Skyview Fund re-upped in the round.
Alongside the Series C round, Semi-Tech said that its management team has joined hands with the firm’s controlling shareholders and industry partners to launch a 1-billion-yuan ($144.7 million) fund to invest in smart manufacturing software and compatible hardware.
The billion-yuan fund will help Semi-Tech increase investments and M&A across the entire smart manufacturing sector. It targets to promote the development of an ecosystem of industrial software for semiconductors, said the firm.
Semi-Tech – whose earlier backers include Habo Investments, which is set up by Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies in 2019 to back domestic chip firms – currently employs almost 800 people, over 80% of which are tech professionals.
The Shanghai-based company provides self-developed CIM solutions, which use computers to control the entire production process, to industries including semiconductors, manufacturing, electronics assembly & packaging, new energy, and automobile.
“Moving forward, Semi-Tech will accelerate the upgrade of our fully-automated CIM solutions to better serve plants producing 12-inch-wide silicon wafers,” said Li Gangjiang, chairman and CEO of Semi-Tech. Li also chairs Baijiayun Group, a Nasdaq-listed provider of video-centric software solutions.
“We look to equip our solutions with big data and AI technologies to help foundries achieve higher manufacturing efficiency, better yields, and wider production scale while reducing their operating costs. The goal is to surpass foreign equivalents by providing domestic CIM alternatives for chip making,” said Li.
The latest financing came less than one year after Semi-Tech secured 540 million yuan ($78.1 million) across two rounds from investors including GL Ventures, the venture capital arm of Hillhouse Capital Group.
The earlier Series A++ and Series B rounds also saw the participation of the China Internet Investment Fund and China’s electric vehicle giant BYD.