Formerly Atomicsemi, Fab2 raises $500M Series A at a $3.7B valuation to mass-produce chip factories
What's the deal? AtomicsemiDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a semiconductor startup that builds and mass-produces small chip fabs which recently renamed itself to Fab2, has raised a $500 million Series A led by FundomoDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → at a $3.7 billion valuation. Corner CapitalDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Paradigm, Duquesne Family OfficeDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Maverick SiliconDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, StepStone Group, ProtagonistDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, UDC VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and angel investor Naval Ravikant also joined.
What's the endgame? The company designs and builds every piece of equipment that goes inside a fab — from pumps, valves, and gas lines to lithography tools and vacuum chambers — then assembles them into compact fabs it manufactures at scale. It calls this a "fab fab," a factory that makes factories, and automates the process in software to test new processes quickly. Its slogan: "We print chips."
Who's behind it? Founded in 2022 as Atomic Semi, the company renamed itself Fab2 in July and moved its headquarters to Texas. Co-founder and chief executive officer Sam Zeloof became known for building chips in his family garage as a high schooler; co-founder Jim Keller is a veteran chip designer behind AMD's Zen, Apple's A4 and A5, and Tesla's Autopilot chip, and now also runs AI chipmaker Tenstorrent.
Why now? Building a single fab typically costs billions of dollars and takes years, leaving advanced foundry work to a handful of players such as TSMC, SamsungDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and Intel, while ASML dominates lithography equipment. As the US pushes to bring chip supply chains back home, startups aiming to tear down those barriers are drawing large rounds.
By the numbers: The company raised a $15 million seed led by the OpenAI Startup FundDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → in 2023 at roughly $100 million. Its valuation has jumped nearly 37 times in under three years.
The signal: Atomicsemi's round sits in the 99th percentile of all US Series A deals on record, a sign of how much capital is flowing to companies attacking the semiconductor equipment stack. Substrate raised a $100 million seed above a $1 billion valuation on a new particle-accelerator lithography approach; xLight is developing EUV light sources; and stealth startup Source Foundry has drawn $500 million at a $5 billion valuation before shipping a product — a wave of bets on breaking the industry's toughest bottlenecks.
Read more: wowtale.net
Image credit: Atomicsemi
