Image Source: Yuanbao

AsianFin — ChipGPT Technology (Suzhou) Co., Ltd., a leading Chinese AI-driven chip yield management platform, has completed a multi-million-dollar Series B financing round.

The round was led by Oriza Holdings, with participation from Longding Capital, Changsha State-Owned Holding Capital, and Conswall Capital, an earlier investor. The exact number of the proceeds has not been disclosed.

The newly secured funds will be allocated towards product development, market expansion, and talent acquisition. Uniwood Capital acted as the exclusive financial advisor for this round.

Founded in 2006 by Yao Wenquan, a veteran of over 20 years of experience in the industrial manufacturing field, ChipGPT initially focused on the wafer fabrication industry with its information software solutions.

In his early years, Yao guided the team to execute big data and AI projects for SMIC (Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation), personally financing the development of yield management software that boosted production line yields by 0.5 percentage points, generating tens of millions of dollars in revenue.

In 2014, ChipGPT partnered with SMIC to jointly develop production line big data analysis and yield analysis technologies, gradually replacing U.S. firm KLA's products in the process. Over the years, ChipGPT has expanded its product suite to include AI-powered tools like YMS, DMS, ADC, and more, revolutionizing the efficiency and capabilities of chip yield analysis.

The company's products are now adopted by over ten wafer fabrication facilities, including SMIC and Hua Hong Semiconductor. ChipGPT is also expanding into advanced packaging production lines and chip design, further broadening its impact across the semiconductor manufacturing industry.

ChipGPT has developed an industry-specific AI large model, ChipSeek, which leverages AI to clean and analyze vast datasets from production equipment and process nodes. This model plays a crucial role in enhancing yield analysis, diagnostic capabilities, and process optimization, significantly improving production efficiency. The commercial rollout of ChipSeek marks a pivotal moment for Chinese semiconductor AI industrial software, ushering in the cognitive intelligence era.

Liu Lizhe, partner at Longding Capital, said that as the semiconductor industry becomes increasingly competitive, industry practitioners have noticed that the breakthrough points for corporate efficiency improvement are shifting from hardware stacking to software - enabled empowerment, and then to AI - enabled empowerment.

Every 1 yuan invested in industrial software can enhance the overall benefits by seven or eight yuan, and this leverage effect is particularly significant in the field of yield management, Liu added.

The inflection point of the yield management industry has already emerged: on the one hand, there are many domestic wafer fabs under construction, and the subsequent capacity ramp-up period will generate yield management demand at the billion-yuan level; on the other hand, the cost of advanced - process tape-outs is becoming increasingly expensive, forcing yield management to leap from post-event attribution to real-time prediction, Liu explained further.

ChipGPT's ability to seize opportunities in the above two aspects, and with its profound technical accumulation and industry experience, it can provide strong support for the yield improvement and process optimization of China's semiconductor industry, and we look forward to its greater breakthroughs in future development, Liu noted.