Japanese computer chip manufacturer MegaChips has led as $140 million Series B funding round for Australian semiconductor manufacturer Morse Micro.
MegaChips has made a $100 million strategic investment with the remainder provided by existing investors including Blackbird Ventures, Main Sequence Ventures, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation’s Clean Energy Innovation Fund, Skip Capital, Uniseed and Malcolm and Lucy Turnbull’s family office.
Morse Micro’s Wi-Fi HaLow chips have wide applications in internet of things (IoT) devices used in applications such as access control systems, security cameras, industrial automation, retail and mobile devices.
The company plans to use the new funding to expand its global team and market its products to major wireless technology businesses worldwide.
Partnering with MegaChips will boost the company’s sales in Japan while also giving it access to large manufacturing capacity.
MegaChips was founded in 1990 as Japan’s first fabless semiconductor company and has been listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange since 1998. The company has grown to be one of the world’s leading application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) providers. MegaChips teams work alongside customers’ design teams in ‘concept to silicon’ development projects. The company recently expanded its range of operations to address growing global demand for embedded AI technology.
Morse Micro’s $23.8 million Series A funding round in mid-2019 was jointly led by Main Sequence Ventures and Ray Stata, founder of semiconductor company Analog Devices (NASDAQ: ADI). Other investors in that round were: Skip Capital, Blackbird Ventures, Right Click Capital, Uniseed, Clean Energy Innovation Fund and PAN Group Investments.
Main Sequence Ventures and Melbourne-based PAN led Morse Micro’s seed round in 2017.
Morse Micro was founded in 2016 by Andrew Terry and Michael De Nil, two electronics engineers who met working in the Sydney design office of US semiconductor company Broadcom.
They set up the company to develop chips especially for internet of things (IoT) applications.
They realised that there was growing demand for chips for IoT applications but existing products, designed for computers and mobile phones, drew too much power.
Morse Micro developed its Wi-Fi HaLow chips completely from scratch, The devices draw low power so can operate for long periods of time on tiny batteries. Operating in the 900MHz radio band, they can also operate over much longer distances than earlier Wi-Fi chips which operate on the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands. The lower frequency also makes the technology’s signals better able to pass through solid objects.
Image: Michael De Nil with one of Morse Micro’s chips.