Chinese industrial software developer Semi-Tech has secured 540 million yuan ($80.6 million) across two funding rounds to expand its product offerings with the support of investors including Hillhouse’s GL Ventures.
The Series A++ and Series B rounds also attracted the participation of the 100-billion-yuan ($15 billion) China Internet Investment Fund, Hong Kong-listed conglomerate BYD, and China’s Will Semiconductor-backed equity investment firm Inno-Chip.
Other investors include venture capital (VC) company Shanghai STVC Group, Shanghai’s Free Trade Zone Fund, and Skyview Fund, a dual-currency fund that invests in early-stage Internet and tech startups.
Shanghai-headquartered Semi-Tech offers self-developed software products to enable the smart manufacturing of various products used in semiconductor, rail transportation, electronic packaging, healthcare, and auto parts.
Its three key business lines cover production management, quality control, and logistics management, providing software solutions to help clients speed up manufacturing processes such as dispatching, fault detection & classification, and statistical process control.
The firm has a total of over 450 employees across its Shanghai headquarters and other cities including Shenzhen, Beijing, Suzhou, and Chengdu in China, as well as overseas branch offices in Singapore and Malaysia. About 80% of its employees are tech professionals.
The fresh capital will fund Semi-Tech’s efforts in further developing its industrial software products, especially the ones used in the semiconductor sector amid China’s efforts to achieve technological self-sufficiency. Semi-Tech claims that it is China’s first domestic firm capable of providing a full set of software solutions to realise the fully automated production of 12-inch silicon wafers – an area that is currently dominated by foreign players.
“The market share taken by home-grown industrial software is widening drastically, with domestic replacement rising as an irresistible trend, especially across core industries like semiconductor,” said Li Liang, founding partner of GL Ventures, in a statement.
As its biggest funding rounds to date, the transactions came about eight months after Semi-Tech closed a Series A+ round from investors including Habo Investments, which is backed by Chinese telecom giant Huawei Technologies. In May 2021, it also raised 50 million yuan ($7.5 million) in a Series A round.