NexiGO raises €2M to build Europe's only gallium-oxide chips

What's the deal? Berlin-based NexiGODealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → has raised €2 million in pre-seed funding to develop gallium-oxide (Ga₂O₃) power semiconductors for next-generation electric vehicles. It is Europe's only maker of the material, which it says can enable EV charging in 10 minutes — down from the roughly 60-minute average using silicon carbide or gallium nitride.

Why now? The round lands a week after the European Commission passed the Chips Act 2.0, aimed at achieving semiconductor manufacturing independence. NexiGO is one of the first power semiconductor makers positioned to meet that goal.

What's the endgame? The company will produce gallium-oxide semiconductors on epitaxial wafers up to four inches — a third the size of the 12-inch wafers used for logic and memory chips. It has judged that scale sufficient to serve domestic power-transmission needs.

Gallium oxide has a bandgap of roughly 4.8 eV, allowing lower energy loss in power transmission. NexiGO says the material is 10 times more power-efficient than silicon carbide, handles up to six times higher voltage density, and costs a quarter as much to produce.

What could go wrong? The four-inch wafer format limits volumes compared with mainstream chip manufacturing, and the technology remains unproven at commercial scale.

NexiGO targets charging stations, renewable-energy inverters, AI data centres, and missile-tracking systems — applications that need ultra-wide-bandgap chips to handle large power surges with minimal loss. Standard semiconductors cannot sustain those voltages.

The signal: As the EU builds sovereign technology infrastructure, capital is flowing to firms that can localise critical hardware. NexiGO's raise shows early investor appetite for European power-chip independence.

Image credit: IBM Research