This Startup Wants to Make Future Chips Easier to Build

Singapore startup Nexstrom has raised a $12 million seed round to help bring new ultra-thin chip materials into real factories. It has raised $15 million in total so far, according to TechCrunch.

Nexstrom was started inside Xora Innovation. The seed round included Xora, Foothill Ventures and SEEDS.

The company is led by chief executive Phoebe Tan. Co-founder and chief scientist Lance Li previously led research on electronics beyond silicon at TSMC.

Nexstrom is not designing chips. It is building machines and factory recipes that let large chip factories make these materials directly on wafers. The materials are called transition-metal dichalcogenides, or TMDs, and they are only a few atoms thick. Its system, called North Star, is made to grow TMDs directly on 300mm wafers, the large discs factories use as the standard base for mass production.

Nexstrom plans to sell its technology to or work with large chipmakers including TSMC, Samsung and Intel. It does not plan to compete with them as a manufacturer. It is based in Singapore. The country drew more than S$30 billion in chip investments from 2022 to 2025, according to EDB.

The broader context here is the difference between lab success and factory readiness. The key point is not that TMDs can be made. It is that they can be grown directly, evenly and cleanly on a large wafer, inside a machine a factory would accept. Direct growth avoids a transfer step, like printing a photo directly on paper instead of printing it elsewhere and trying to stick it on without wrinkles. Transfer adds flaws, contamination risk and extra handling that factories avoid.

In my view, the business approach matters as much as the science. Selling machines to existing chipmakers needs less capital than building a factory. It also lets factories test what they care about, which is flaw levels, repeatability, heat tolerance and maintenance. Factories approve machines, not research papers.

Worth flagging is what customer tests still need to show. Speed, stable operating range, chemical handling, controls to prevent unwanted mixing, measurement methods, and fit with current early factory steps will decide if North Star moves from testing to pilot use. These open questions are normal at this early stage. They are also exactly what factory engineers will check. No funding announcement settles them.

Looking at what this enables if the work succeeds, the benefit is choice. A reliable TMD step that fits current 300mm factory flow would give engineers another building block, including for stacked layers and mixed-material designs, without changing the base material or factory setup. Small steps that fit current factories have usually entered production more easily.

My own expectation, after watching many materials move from lab to factory, is slow progress at first and then faster progress. Early work means long testing and machine fixes. Later work moves quickly once reliability data builds up. The $12 million pays for test runs, measurements and customer work. It does not skip that learning. It lets that learning begin.