SemiFive has secured Doosan Group as an investor in its Series C funding round, TheElec has learned.
The system chip design house had aimed to secure 60 billion won in funding during the round but expected secure a total of 70 billion won from investors including Doosan Group.
LB Investment and SV Investment are taking part as financial investors; Doosan Group is taking part as a strategic investor.
The conglomerate is expected to invest tens of billions of wons for equity.
Last year, Doosan began taping into the chip market as a back-end service provider. It acquired outsourced semiconductor packaging and test firm Tesna for 460 billion won in that year. Doosan Tesna has Samsung and SK Hynix as customers and offer testing for application processors, image sensors and RF chips.
Sources said the company wants to expand its business outside of just packaging and testing to system chips.
SemiFive was founded in 2018 by CEO Brandon Cho and other members of US chip startup SiFive.
The company is a design solution partner to Samsung for the latter’s foundry business.
SemiFive grew quickly by acquiring other system chip companies and offers services in data centers, AI chips, and other system semiconductors. One of its customers has started production of a 14nm AI chip this year.