Floadia Corporation, a maker of embedded flash memory based in Japan, has raised roughly JPY 1.05 billion ($7.04 million) in a Series D investment.
Inabata & Co., Ltd., with headquarters in Chuo-ku, Osaka, and Cypress Capital, an investment firm in Hong Kong, underwrote an allotment of capital for a total of JPY 850 million ($5.7 million), according to a statement released by Floadia.
The funding also includes the JPY 200 million ($1.34 million) that Japan Finance Corporation raised through venture debt (a loan with equity acquisition rights) in March 2023.
About JPY 3.9 billion ($26.15 million) has already been invested in Floadia by the INCJ (Japanese government fund), UMC Capital (Taiwan), a subsidiary of major foundry UMC, Faraday Technology (Taiwan), a leading semiconductor design firm, and Teijin Limited, a significant Japanese chemical company.
The cumulative total raised to date is roughly JPY 4.95 billion ($33.19 million) when the amount raised in this round is added.
Floadia stated that it would put the money raised toward advancing the development of ultra-low power consumption artificial intelligence (AI) accelerator chips that make use of flash memory devices as well as enhancing sales activities promoting its current primary business, embedded flash memory intellectual property (IP) cores, to semiconductor manufacturers.
It should be mentioned that Inabata, a participant in this round, runs numerous companies abroad in the information and electronics, chemicals, consumer products, and plastics sectors. The company intends to use the network to promote Floadia’s international sales.
In 2011, Floadia was founded by seasoned engineers who had spent more than 20 years creating integrated non-volatile memory at Hitachi, Ltd., and Renesas Technology (now Renesas Electronics Corporation).
The company’s business is to sell intellectual property (IP) licenses to semiconductor manufacturers for the production of flash memory, a type of non-volatile memory (memory that retains data even when the power is switched off).
Its flash memory IP cores can be integrated into devices for a reasonable price and are mostly used in microcontrollers, power semiconductors, sensors, etc. They consume a great deal less power than traditional flash memory IP cores.
As a foundation of the industry after flash memory IP cores, Floadia is also creating computing in memory (CIM) chips, which utilise flash memory devices as information transmission media.
