Nexstrom raises $12M to advance 2D semiconductor technology

A semiconductor startup that’s barely a year old just landed $12 million to build the machines that could make silicon obsolete. Nexstrom, founded in Singapore in December 2023, is developing equipment to manufacture two-dimensional semiconductor materials at wafer scale, targeting the kind of ultra-low-power chips that AI workloads are increasingly demanding. The round was led by Xora Innovation, a venture firm connected to Temasek, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund. What Nexstrom is actually building Nexstrom’s bet is on transition metal dichalcogenides, or TMDs, a class of materials like molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) that remain functional even when they’re just a few atoms thick. The company uses proprietary Metal-Organic Chemical Vapour Deposition (MOCVD) systems to grow these materials. Nexstrom claims to have achieved an industry first: producing monocrystalline 2D films on 300mm wafers. That’s the standard wafer size used in today’s advanced chip fabs. The performance numbers the company is touting are striking. At sub-1nm thickness, Nexstrom reports 100x carrier mobility compared to conventional approaches, along with over 50% improvement in power efficiency versus leading-e...