Vinci raises $250 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation to build ai-native physics infrastructure for hardware engineering. 12 minutes ago Vinci has raised a $250 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation to build an AI-native platform that lets hardware engineers understand how products will behave while they are still being designed. Vinci has announced a $250 million Series B co-led by Advent, Temasek and Xora, with participation from AMD Ventures, Eclipse, Khosla Ventures, Madrona and others, valuing the company at $1.5 billion. Vinci is building an AI-native computational platform intended to widen what hardware engineers can create. It starts with Continuous Physics Reasoning, the ability to understand how a complex product will actually behave while it is still being designed. The company's aim is for engineers to explore far more possibilities, find better designs and eventually create products beyond the reach of today's engineering tools. The new capital will help Vinci build on its initial success in semiconductor physics by covering more physical phenomena, engineering disciplines and hardware industries. Vinci's founding argument is that human imagination has long run ahead of the ability to engineer what is imagined. Turning an idea into a working physical product means navigating huge design spaces, understanding interactions across increasingly complex systems and finding solutions within the limits of physics, materials, manufacturing and technology, and these challenges grow as products become more complex. Vinci's long-term ambition is to remove these barriers by cutting the time, computation and specialist expertise needed to turn an idea into a physical product. Continuous Physics Reasoning: understanding while designing. Continuous Physics Reasoning, Vinci's core product capability, gives engineers deterministic, solver-accurate insight into how a product will behave during design, rather than waiting for isolated simulation checkpoints. The platform is already running on production engineering programmes and analyses manufacturing-scale designs of up to more than 15 billion degrees of freedom in minutes rather than hours or days. "Designing advanced systems requires engineers to understand how thermal, physical and electrical behavior interact across the chip, package and board," said Brian Amick, senior vice president of technology and engineering, AMD. "By bringing fast, accurate simulation into the design process, teams can evaluate tradeoffs earlier, iterate more quickly and make better architectural decisions while there is still time to act. We're excited to support Vinci as it helps bring these capabilities to engineering teams." The capability rests on a new computational architecture that combines automated design understanding and preparation, agentic orchestration, a Foundation Model for Physics and GPU-native physics kernels. Surrogate models have to be trained or tuned for particular designs, geometries or problem classes, but Vinci works zero-shot on new designs with no customer-specific training or fine-tuning. The result, the company says, is deterministic, solver-accurate physics at manufacturing resolution and engineering speed. Vinci has already commercialised Continuous Physics Reasoning across thermal, thermo-mechanical and convective fluid behaviour, beginning in semiconductors, which it describes as one of the most physically demanding engineering environments in the world. At that speed and scale, engineers can use physics differently, exploring far more possibilities, examining tradeoffs and understanding physical consequences while they can still influence the design. Expanding across Physics and engineering. The $250 million will drive Vinci along two dimensions. On the physics side, it plans to widen coverage beyond thermal, thermo-mechanical and convective fluid capabilities towards broad coverage across hardware systems, including memory and advanced computing, vehicles, aircraft and satellites. On the engineering side, it will move beyond showing engineers what will happen and towards helping them decide what should change, orchestrating increasingly complex systems and constraints, and ultimately creating new designs from human intent. Semiconductors are Vinci's first proving ground, not its destination. The same challenge appears wherever complex physical products must be designed across multiple physics, engineering disciplines, suppliers and organisations, and Vinci's long-term goal is to bring a growing share of that accumulated engineering knowledge into a single AI-native system. The round brings together investors with experience across technology, AI, semiconductors, industrial transformation and long-term infrastructure investment. Advent, Temasek and Xora co-led, with participation from AMD Ventures, Madrona, existing investors Eclipse and Khosla Ventures, and others. The company believes the opportunity goes well beyond making today's engineering analysis faster, and that it can sharply reduce the gap between human intent and a physically realisable product. "The complexity of the physical systems the world is building is increasing dramatically, while the computational infrastructure engineers use to understand those systems has not kept pace. Vinci has developed a fundamentally new approach to this problem and has already demonstrated it in some of the world's most demanding engineering environments. We believe Vinci has the potential to become a foundational technology for a new era of hardware engineering," said Alek Ferro, Technology Investor at Advent. "Physics defines the system of truth for the world we live and build in, and its laws dictate almost everything we build. Yet, hardware engineers have been forced to treat simulation as a scarce resource, with every answer costing hours of compute, days of waiting, and a specialist's time. Vinci unshackles the creators from that bottleneck by making physical understanding continuous and almost instantaneous," said Karan Mehandru, managing director at Madrona. "Hardik and the Vinci team have proven that when design and experimentation are tightly coupled with answers grounded in the laws of physics, we not only enable physical designers to operate at the speed of thought, but also unleash a new high-water mark of productivity across the entire supply chain of hardware design." "Leonardo da Vinci imagined the airscrew more than four centuries before the first practical helicopter could be built. The idea existed; the engineering capability to realize it did not," said Dr. Hardik Kabaria, co-founder and CEO of Vinci. "That gap still exists throughout engineering today. Our ambition is to compress it. Vinci is starting by giving engineers the ability to understand physical behavior while they are still designing. From there, we are building toward systems that can identify what should change, bring together increasingly complex engineering domains, and ultimately help engineers create what they could not create before. Continuous Physics Reasoning is where that journey begins." "We backed Vinci on the conviction that embedding intelligence directly into the physics of engineering could fundamentally expand what engineers are able to design and build. Vinci has now turned that thesis into a production platform operating in some of the world's most demanding engineering environments. By making solver-accurate physics continuous in the design process, Vinci lets engineers explore far more possibilities and pursue designs that would previously have been too costly, slow, or complex to evaluate," said Phil Inagaki, Chief Investment Officer at Xora Innovation. "As Vinci expands across physics and engineering disciplines, it is becoming the foundational intelligence layer for the physical world, shortening design cycles, avoiding costly downstream failures, and bringing more ambitious, higher-performing products to market faster."

Nexstrom raises $12 million seed round to commercialize the first 12-inch single-crystal 2D semiconductor platform. Sep 22, 2026, 10:00 ET The funding enables the next generation of AI and high-performance computing chips beyond the limit of silicon, while accelerating the industry's first 12-inch single-crystal 2D semiconductor platform SINGAPORE, Sept. 22, 2026 /PRNewswire/ - Nexstrom, the semiconductor company building the first wafer-scale platform for 2D semiconductor materials, today announced it has raised a $12 million seed round led by Xora Innovation, with participation from Foothill Ventures and SEEDS. The round brings Nexstrom's total capital raised to $15 million, including $3 million in non-dilutive funds. The funding will accelerate commercialization of Nexstrom's wafer-scale 2D semiconductor platform, driving toward the industry's first 12-inch 2D wafer growth on production-ready manufacturing tools. The Singapore-based company is also working closely with prominent industry partners to validate its technology within existing chip manufacturing workflows, positioning Nexstrom to bring next-generation semiconductor materials into large-scale commercial production. As AI workloads drive demand for faster, more energy-efficient computing, the semiconductor industry is approaching the physical limits of silicon. There is a hard ceiling to how much silicon channels can continue to shrink before electrons begin leaking, causing significant power loss. Nexstrom aims to bypass this bottleneck by developing the industry's first platform for growing 12-inch single-crystal 2D semiconductor materials. These atomically thin materials support precise electron control, reduce energy loss at the transistor level, and improve efficiency, while remaining compatible with advanced foundry manufacturing. Nexstrom is developing the commercial-scale platform advanced foundries need for next-generation computing. "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. "For years, the challenge has not been demonstrating the promise of 2D materials, but manufacturing them at the scale and quality advanced foundries require." Nexstrom was incubated through Xora's venture-building model to bridge the gap between academic research and commercial semiconductor manufacturing. Through this model, Nexstrom developed a practical path to manufacturing wafer-scale single-crystal 2D semiconductors, allowing chipmakers to move beyond the limitations of conventional materials and build the next generation of AI infrastructure. Unlike existing methods that yield only small laboratory samples or require changes to existing foundry manufacturing processes, Nexstrom's full-stack platform integrates proprietary chemical vapor deposition (CVD) hardware, process technology, and wafer-scale 2D material growth right into a foundry's existing workflow. By combining advanced equipment, specialized chemistry, and manufacturing expertise, Nexstrom's technology promises continuous, single-crystal 2D material growth across industry-standard 12-inch wafers, providing a clear path to commercial adoption. Nexstrom's technical foundation is anchored by Dr. Lance Li, a globally recognized leader in 2D materials and a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher since 2018, a distinction recognizing roughly the top 0.1% of researchers worldwide by research influence. A pioneer in single-crystal MoS[2] (molybdenum disulfide) growth since 2012, he later led corporate research at TSMC on post-silicon electronics, bringing decades of expertise across 2D materials, atomic-layer chemistry, and semiconductor manufacturing to Nexstrom. Nexstrom is also supported by a board and advisory group that includes semiconductor industry leaders Dr. Sundar Ramamurthy, Dr. Philip Wong, Dr. Aaron Thean and Dr. John Langan. "The question is no longer whether 2D semiconductors matter. They are already on the technology roadmap of major semiconductor companies. The challenge is making them manufacturable," said Dr. Philip Wong, Board Advisor at Nexstrom and Inez Kerr Bell Professor at Stanford University. "The industry needs high-quality, uniform 2D materials on 300 mm substrates, and solving that materials bottleneck is exactly where Nexstrom is focused." By enabling wafer-scale 2D semiconductors compatible with advanced manufacturing, Nexstrom is laying the foundation for the post-silicon era of computing. The new funding will support ongoing platform development, strategic collaborations with semiconductor foundries, and the expansion of Nexstrom's engineering and leadership teams as the company advances high-performance, low-power chips for AI, data centers, and future computing applications. About Nexstrom Founded in 2024, Nexstrom is a semiconductor technology company advancing wafer-scale 2D materials for next-generation AI and high-performance computing. The company has developed the industry's first platform for producing 12-inch single-crystal 2D semiconductors, allowing chipmakers to overcome silicon's limitations and create faster, more energy-efficient devices. Backed by Xora Innovation, Foothill Ventures, and SEEDS, an arm of SG Growth Capital, Nexstrom is helping bring 2D semiconductor technology from the lab to commercial manufacturing. SOURCE Nexstrom

Singapore-based Nexstrom has raised $12 million in a round led by Xora Innovation, a venture firm linked to Temasek. Founded in December 2023, the startup develops equipment to manufacture two-dimensional semiconductor materials at wafer scale. Nexstrom focuses on transition metal dichalcogenides, atomically thin materials that remain functional at just a few atoms thick. The company uses proprietary Metal-Organic Chemical Vapour Deposition systems to grow these materials on 300mm wafers, the standard size in advanced chip fabrication. Nexstrom claims its materials deliver 100 times carrier mobility gains over silicon at sub-1nm thickness, with over 50% improvement in power efficiency. The startup is led by CEO Dr Phoebe Tan and has established research collaborations with Purdue University, National University of Singapore, and Dankook University.