Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) chip startup Beijing Tsingmicro Intelligent Technology has raised over 2 billion yuan ($282.9 million) in a Series C round of financing led by state-owned energy group Beijing Energy Holding, as it moves towards a public listing.
Beijing Energy Holdings led a consortium of both state-linked and privately-run investment firms to invest in the deal, including BCT Capital, China Jianyin Investment, and SummitView Capital, the startup announced in its latest WeChat post.
The round also drew backing from existing shareholders such as Beijing Zhongguancun Science City Innovation Development; Beijing Information Industry Development Investment Fund; G&O Capital; and Sense Capital, an AI investment platform affiliated with the Hong Kong-based AI group SenseTime, according to the post.
The Series C round marks the largest financing so far raised by Tsingmicro since its inception in 2018 as a project grown out of the Microelectronics Institute of Tsinghua University.
The new financing will allow Tsingmicro to invest heavily in the R&D of its next-generation chip products and solutions, talent recruitment, as well as the mass adoption and commercialisation of its offerings in the market.
Meanwhile, the startup is said to have started the preparation works for its initial public offering (IPO), as it aims to become “China’s first publicly-traded developer of non-GPU, new architecture chips,” according to its long-standing backer G&O Capital, which reupped in the Series C round after joining the startup’s five previous funding rounds.
The Beijing-headquartered startup, shortly known as Tsingmicro, specialises in coarse-grained reconfigurable array (CGRA) of chips. Widely recognised as a promising and important component in the evolution of computing architecture, CGRA chips aim to strike a balance between the flexibility of software and the high performance and energy efficiency of custom hardware.
The startup, led by its CEO and chairman Wang Bo, mass-produces a dozen of chip models under its two main flagship series, TX5 and TX 8, to power computing demand in intelligent computing centres, large AI models, autonomous driving, and smart security systems. It serves clients including the State Grid Corporation of China, the country’s state-owned electric utility group; as well as Alibaba Group, Tencent, Huawei, and the partly state-owned SenseTime,
To date, Tsingmicro has delivered an estimated 10 million chip units since the start of its mass production in the first half of 2019.
