Singapore-based Nexstrom will use new funding to scale wafer-level 2D material growth for advanced semiconductor manufacturing.
Singapore-based semiconductor company Nexstrom has raised $12 million in a seed funding round led by Xora Innovation, with participation from Foothill Ventures and SEEDS. The financing brings Nexstrom’s total capital raised to $15 million, including $3 million in non-dilutive funding.
The company said the funding will accelerate commercialization of its wafer-scale 2D semiconductor platform, with a focus on developing 12-inch single-crystal 2D material growth using production-ready manufacturing equipment.
Nexstrom is developing a platform for growing atomically thin 2D semiconductor materials, including molybdenum disulfide (MoS₂), on 300mm wafers. The company aims to address manufacturing challenges that have limited the use of 2D materials in semiconductor production.
The platform combines proprietary chemical vapor deposition (CVD) equipment, process technology and wafer-scale material growth with existing foundry manufacturing workflows. According to Nexstrom, the approach is intended to enable continuous single-crystal 2D material growth across industry-standard 12-inch wafers without requiring major changes to existing manufacturing processes.
The company is targeting applications in AI, data centers and other computing systems where continued transistor scaling is increasingly constrained by power consumption and leakage.
“Silicon has fueled decades of computing innovation, but the industry now needs a new materials platform to continue scaling performance,” said Dr. Lance Li, co-founder and chief scientist of Nexstrom. He said the challenge has shifted from demonstrating the potential of 2D materials to manufacturing them at the scale and quality required by advanced foundries.
Nexstrom was incubated through Xora Innovation’s venture-building model, which the company said helped bridge academic research and semiconductor manufacturing. It is working with industry partners to validate its technology within existing chip manufacturing processes.
Li has worked on single-crystal MoS₂ growth since 2012 and previously led corporate research at TSMC focused on post-silicon electronics. He has also been a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher since 2018.
Nexstrom’s board and advisory group includes semiconductor industry figures Dr. Sundar Ramamurthy, Dr. Philip Wong, Dr. Aaron Thean and Dr. John Langan.
“The industry needs high-quality, uniform 2D materials on 300 mm substrates, and solving that materials bottleneck is exactly where Nexstrom is focused,” said Wong, a board advisor and Inez Kerr Bell Professor at Stanford University.
The new funding will support further platform development, collaborations with semiconductor foundries, and expansion of Nexstrom’s engineering and leadership teams as it works toward commercial-scale 2D semiconductor manufacturing.