UJ-Crystal raises ¥430M for high-voltage SiC power chips
What's the deal? UJ-CrystalDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a Nagoya University spinout developing silicon carbide (SiC) semiconductor wafers, has raised ¥430 million in an early-stage round. The investment came via a third-party allotment led by SBI InvestmentDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Kyoto University Innovation CapitalDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and Chiiki to Hito to Mirai, alongside other institutional and individual backers.
What's the endgame? UJ-Crystal will use the funds to speed development of ultra-high-voltage p-type SiC substrate wafers, made using a solution growth method paired with AI digital twin simulation. The company is chasing what it calls the world's first social implementation of the technology.
Why now? Surging power demand from AI and data centres is straining grids, and the company says roughly 3,000GW of renewable electricity globally cannot be transmitted. Next-generation power systems — HVDC, STATCOM, and SST devices — need high-power semiconductors that current SiC production methods struggle to deliver.
Conventional sublimation growth makes it hard to control doping and quality for p-type SiC. UJ-Crystal's solution growth approach, developed from research in the Ujihara lab at Nagoya University, aims to solve that bottleneck.
What's next? The company is weighing a further ¥570 million raise, including possible follow-on investment from early backers tied to milestones by year-end.
Investors point to the founder's track record. "Ujihara has spent more than 20 years advancing SiC crystal technology, and it is now entering the mass-production stage for social implementation," said SBI Investment. Kyoto iCap framed the work as the first update to direct-current transmission "since Edison invented" it.
The signal: At ¥430 million (about $2.7 million), the round sits in the lower half of comparable deals by size — modest for a company targeting a hard hardware problem. But the mix of SBI and two university-linked funds signals conviction that Japanese deep-tech, built on decades of lab research, can move from bench to grid at commercial scale.
Read more: PR TIMES
Image credit: UJ-Crystal
