Semiconductor Funding Tracker (373 deals)

Our funding tracker covering the semiconductor industry

Below is the table listing all the deals. You may find our methodology at the end of this page.

And, if you want to gain a deeper understanding of the market and its current dynamics, get our report covering the Semiconductor Industry.

Is semiconductor funding really a $34 billion market right now?

Semiconductor funding is worth at least $34.2 billion across the period we studied, but a typical company lives in a much smaller funding market than that headline suggests.

We tracked 374 financings across 309 semiconductor companies. Capital could be quantified for 303 of those deals, representing at least $34.22 billion. The typical disclosed round was roughly $24 million, while the average was close to $113 million.

That huge gap comes from the top of the market. If we remove financings above $100 million, only about $5.0 billion remains. Remove rounds above $50 million and the figure falls to roughly $3.5 billion.

The latest large rounds make the split even clearer. Positron has now raised more than $1.1 billion across the window, Cerebras raised $1.1 billion and then another $1 billion, and Rapidus raised more than $2.6 billion across two financings. These deals are real, but they describe a very different part of the market from a startup raising $15 million or $30 million.

Market measure	Result
Financings	374
Unique companies	309
Companies with multiple financings	55
Deals with quantifiable amounts	303
Quantifiable capital	≥$34.22B
Capital excluding >$50M rounds	~$3.51B
Capital excluding >$100M rounds	~$4.98B
Typical disclosed round	~$24M

How many semiconductor companies are actually getting funded?

The semiconductor funding market currently contains just over 300 companies, and most of them only appear once.

We found 309 unique companies across 374 financings. Of those, 254 had one financing during the period, 47 had two and only eight appeared three times or more.

Repeat fundraising is fairly rare: around 18% of companies came back for another observable financing during the window.

The money is much less evenly divided. Companies that appeared only once raised about $14.0 billion in total, while the 55 repeat fundraisers accumulated roughly $20.2 billion.

A fairly small group of companies therefore keeps returning to the market and collecting increasingly large cheques. That becomes much clearer once we stop treating every financing as if it belonged to a different startup.

Are a few semiconductor companies swallowing most of the funding?

Yes. Semiconductor funding is heavily concentrated today, with ten companies accounting for roughly 52% of the capital we could quantify.

BOE Integrated leads at about $2.76 billion, followed closely by CXMT at $2.72 billion and Rapidus at $2.64 billion. Cerebras moves into the top group once its latest $1 billion financing is included, bringing its total across the period to roughly $2.1 billion.

Several companies also raised repeatedly. Etched appeared four times, Rebellions four times, Ayar Labs three times and CXMT three times. Positron moved from a $50 million-plus Series A to a $230 million Series B and then to an $875 million Series C.

So the concentration comes from more than isolated blockbuster deals. Capital keeps accumulating around companies that have already persuaded investors to fund them before.

Company	Financings	Quantifiable capital
BOE Integrated	1	$2.764B
CXMT	3	$2.717B
Rapidus	2	$2.643B
Cerebras	2	$2.100B
Hefei Wanxin Integrated Circuit	2	$1.766B
Etched	4	$1.620B
Tenstorrent	2	$1.580B
Positron AI	2	$1.105B
Ayar Labs	3	$805M
Rebellions	4	$789M

What can a normal semiconductor startup actually expect to raise?

A normal semiconductor startup raising money these days should think in tens of millions of dollars.

Among the 303 financings where we could establish a usable amount, 48 were below $5 million, 74 were between $5 million and $20 million and 86 landed between $20 million and $50 million.

That $20 million-to-$50 million range was the busiest part of the market. Put the first three brackets together and roughly 69% of disclosed rounds came in below $50 million.

The giant rounds tell a completely different story. Only about a quarter of disclosed financings were $100 million or larger, yet they produced around 86% of all quantifiable capital.

For founders, the practical benchmark is therefore much closer to $10 million, $25 million or $40 million than to the nine-figure rounds that dominate semiconductor news.

Why do some semiconductor companies suddenly need hundreds of millions of dollars?

The biggest semiconductor rounds usually appear when a company has to turn a working technology into something that can be manufactured and deployed at serious scale.

Rapidus is the clearest example. The Japanese company secured ¥267.6 billion from the government and private-sector investors as it worked toward 2 nm mass production. A further ¥150 billion government investment followed. Rapidus has explicitly tied that funding to moving from R&D toward full-scale manufacturing.

Ayar Labs raised $500 million in its latest Series E and said the money would help expand high-volume production and test capacity for its co-packaged optics technology. Investors included AMD, Alchip, MediaTek and NVIDIA alongside financial backers.

Etched had raised $800 million by the time it came out of stealth with a working AI chip and more than $1 billion of signed customer contracts. Its latest disclosed $500 million financing arrived as the company moved deeper into commercial hardware production.

Cerebras gives us another useful example. Its recent financings are supporting AI processors, packaging, systems, manufacturing capacity and data-center expansion rather than a small engineering team designing an early prototype.

Once a semiconductor company reaches that point, tape-outs, advanced packaging, wafers, testing, inventory, manufacturing capacity and customer deployment can consume capital extremely quickly.

Which semiconductor sectors are attracting the most money now?

Logic semiconductors are currently the center of the funding market, while foundries and memory require far more capital per deal.

Logic produced 191 financings and about $20.48 billion of quantifiable capital. That is roughly half of all transactions and close to 60% of the money.

AI infrastructure is one reason the category has become so important. Etched, Cerebras, Tenstorrent, Positron and Rebellions are all competing somewhere around AI compute or inference, while Ayar Labs is attacking the interconnect bottleneck that appears when huge numbers of accelerators have to communicate efficiently.

Foundry services looks completely different. We found only ten financings, but they absorbed roughly $7.51 billion. Rapidus alone explains a large part of that figure, although the category remains extremely capital-intensive even without its biggest deal.

Memory shows a similar pattern with 16 transactions and about $3.01 billion. Sensors sit at the opposite end: 39 deals produced only about $455 million, with a median financing below $8 million.

So when someone says "semiconductor funding," they may be grouping together businesses with completely different capital requirements. A sensor startup raising $6 million and a new advanced-node manufacturing project raising $1 billion belong to the same industry, but financially they barely resemble each other.

Category	Deals	Capital	Median round	Capital intensity
Logic	191	$20.48B	~$40M	~1.17×
Analog	71	$1.70B	~$17M	~0.26×
Power	47	$1.06B	~$20M	~0.25×
Sensor	39	$455M	~$8M	~0.13×
Memory	16	$3.01B	~$24M	~2.06×
Foundry services	10	$7.51B	~$337M	~8.22×

Are semiconductor investors mostly backing new startups?

Semiconductor investors are currently putting far more money into companies that have already raised before.

We classified 313 of the 374 financings as follow-ons. Only 61 were first financings.

The size difference is large as well. A first financing had a median of about $7.9 million, compared with roughly $27 million for a follow-on.

That fits what we see among many of the companies attracting serious capital now. Positron, Rebellions, Etched and Ayar Labs have all moved through repeated rounds rather than jumping directly into one giant financing.

The semiconductor funding market these days is therefore heavily shaped by companies returning for more money after investors have already seen some technical progress, manufacturing progress or customer validation.

How old are semiconductor startups when investors fund them?

Semiconductor companies usually spend several years building before they reach meaningful funding milestones.

Across the companies where we could establish a founding year, the median age at financing was around four years. Seed companies were typically about two years old, Series A companies four, Series B companies five and Series C companies seven.

By Series D and later, the typical company was around a decade old.

The founding cohorts make the same point from another angle. Companies founded in 2020, 2021 and 2022 generated far more funding observations than companies founded in 2025 or 2026.

That makes sense once we look at what has to happen before a semiconductor product becomes investable at scale. Architecture, tape-outs, silicon validation, software support, manufacturing relationships and customer qualification can take years.

Much of the money flowing into the sector today is financing technology that has already been under development for a long time.

Where does semiconductor fundraising get really hard?

Semiconductor fundraising gets much tougher after Series B, and Series C is where the financial jump becomes brutal.

We counted 74 Seed financings, 82 Series A rounds and 67 Series B rounds. The market then falls to 43 Series C deals and 22 Series D-or-later financings.

Round size changes much faster than deal count. The median financing moves from about $24 million at Series A to $27.8 million at Series B, then jumps to roughly $135 million at Series C.

That is a different fundraising problem. A company asking investors for $25 million can still be financing product development and market entry. A company asking for $135 million generally needs a much stronger case around manufacturing, customers, deployment and the path to scale.

Alternative labels make the later-stage picture slightly messy. We also identified 28 Growth Equity deals and 58 transactions where the stage could not be established reliably. Semiconductor companies often raise through structures that do not fit the neat Seed-to-Series-E ladder used by software startups.

Even with that caveat, the narrowing is clear. Plenty of semiconductor companies reach A and B rounds; far fewer make the leap into repeated nine-figure financing.

Stage	Deals	Quantifiable capital	Median round
Seed	74	$1.04B	$5.8M
Series A	82	$3.18B	$24.0M
Series B	67	$4.14B	$27.8M
Series C	43	$5.78B	$135M
Series D+	22	~$5.80B	~$150M
Growth Equity	28	$8.63B	$63.2M
Unknown	58	$5.66B	$12.5M

Do corporate investors really matter in semiconductor funding?

Corporate and strategic investors matter a lot in semiconductor funding, appearing in roughly 38% of the financings we tracked.

Rounds involving an identifiable strategic investor had a median size of roughly $43.5 million, compared with $16.7 million when no strategic investor was identified.

Part of that gap comes from selection. Corporates naturally show up more often around businesses that are already large enough to matter to their supply chains, customers or technology roadmaps.

The names make the relationship easier to understand. Samsung Catalyst Fund, NVIDIA and Bosch Ventures repeatedly appeared in the market, alongside Intel Capital, Microsoft's M12 and Cisco Investments.

Recent deals are particularly revealing. Ayar Labs brought AMD, Alchip, MediaTek and NVIDIA into its $500 million Series E. Rebellions' $250 million Series C included Arm and Samsung Ventures. Positron's Series B brought in Arm and other strategic investors.

For semiconductor startups, that kind of investor can bring much more than money: manufacturing relationships, technical validation, ecosystem access and potential customers can all sit behind the cheque.

Which semiconductor investors keep coming back?

The semiconductor investor base is surprisingly fragmented, with only a small number of lead investors appearing repeatedly.

Maverick Silicon was the most recurrent lead in our research, appearing across seven financings. Fidelity Management & Research and imec.xpand each appeared four times, while Innovation Industries, Atreides Management, Seligman Ventures and Matter Venture Partners each appeared three times.

That leaves a very long tail of investors who only led or participated prominently once.

Large semiconductor financings also tend to pull together unusual combinations of capital. Tenstorrent's $693 million-plus Series D, for example, combined financial investors with groups linked to Samsung, LG and Hyundai. Rebellions brought together institutional capital with Arm, Samsung Ventures and Pegatron VC. Rapidus combines private companies with direct Japanese state investment.

The funding ecosystem still depends on venture firms, but later-stage capital increasingly overlaps with industrial strategy, sovereign investment and the semiconductor supply chain itself.

Is China actually dominating semiconductor funding?

China dominates semiconductor deal count, while the United States currently raises slightly more visible capital with barely half as many transactions.

We found 161 Chinese financings worth at least $12.81 billion. The United States produced 86 deals worth roughly $13.90 billion after including Cerebras's latest financing.

That difference is striking. China generated almost twice as many deals, yet the two countries ended up in roughly the same funding range.

The regional picture tells the same story. Asia-Pacific produced well over half of all financings and roughly half of quantifiable capital. North America accounted for about a quarter of transactions but more than 40% of the money.

Japan is the extreme case. Only a handful of Japanese financings appear in the dataset, yet Rapidus alone pushes the country's total into the billions.

Looking only at deal count therefore makes Asia appear much more dominant than it looks when we follow the dollars.

Does Europe have a semiconductor startup problem?

Europe has plenty of semiconductor funding activity. The weak point is the size of the rounds European companies raise.

We counted 66 European financings, around 18% of all transactions, but they generated only about $2.53 billion. That is roughly 7% of the quantifiable capital in the market.

The median European round was about $12 million. North America's median was several times larger.

That gap becomes especially uncomfortable once companies reach the expensive part of semiconductor development. Europe can produce chip-design startups, sensor companies, power-semiconductor businesses and deep-tech research spinouts. Scaling them through manufacturing and large commercial deployment requires much larger pools of capital.

European policymakers clearly see the same problem. The European Chips Act created funding mechanisms aimed specifically at semiconductor startups and scale-ups, and the European Commission's newer Chips Act 2.0 work again emphasizes advanced manufacturing, scale-up financing and stronger links between chip companies and industrial demand.

Europe's current weakness looks much more like a scale-up financing gap than a shortage of semiconductor ideas.

How much should we trust semiconductor funding totals?

Semiconductor funding totals should be treated as documented minimums because disclosure is still patchy and the financing structures are often messy.

We could quantify 303 of 374 financings, or about 81%. The remaining deals included undisclosed amounts, vague descriptions such as "tens of millions," or figures that could only be treated as lower bounds.

Stage information was also unavailable for 58 transactions, while an identifiable lead investor could only be established for roughly 60% of deals.

Semiconductor financing creates extra headaches because many announcements mix equity with government support, loans, grants, capital increases, tranches or other instruments. We only use amounts when the relevant financing component can be established with enough confidence.

We also run cross-market consistency checks before closing the dataset. That final pass caught a $1 billion Cerebras Series H that had been correctly recorded in our adjacent AI-chip research but had not been carried into the semiconductor cohort. We added it before producing the figures in this article.

There will still be financings where public information simply does not support an exact number. Leaving those amounts undisclosed produces a less tidy dataset, but it gives us a more defensible picture of the market.

What should we actually take away from semiconductor funding?

Semiconductor funding currently looks like a broad startup market sitting underneath a much narrower industrial-scale capital market.

More than 300 companies raised money, so this is clearly bigger than a handful of famous AI-chip startups. At the same time, ten companies captured roughly half of the capital we could quantify.

A normal financing remains in the tens of millions. The spectacular headline totals come from foundries, memory projects and a relatively small group of advanced logic companies raising hundreds of millions or billions.

The market also becomes much harder around Series C. That is where median round size suddenly moves into nine figures and where far fewer companies continue up the ladder.

Logic is currently where breadth and money overlap most strongly, helped by the huge investment cycle around AI compute, inference, networking and optical interconnects. Foundries and memory consume even more capital per deal, while sensors remain a much smaller funding market despite producing plenty of startups.

Strategic investors are woven into the market as well. Semiconductor companies often need manufacturing partners, customers and ecosystem support alongside capital, which helps explain why chipmakers, cloud companies, automotive groups and electronics manufacturers keep appearing in funding rounds.

Geography adds another layer. China produces far more deals than the United States, yet U.S. companies attract roughly comparable or slightly greater disclosed capital. Europe participates meaningfully at the startup level but struggles to match North American scale-up cheques.

And the $34 billion-plus headline needs context. Most companies will never raise anything close to the rounds that create that number.