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 RavikantDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → 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 IntelDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, 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
