A new round of funding has been announced by SixSense, a Singapore-based artificial intelligence (AI) company that manufactures semiconductors. Alpha Intelligence Capital, Febe, and Surge (formerly Sequoia India & SEA) are leading the round.
With this new funding, the company plans to expand into chipmaking hubs in Malaysia, Taiwan, and the US. It also plans to collaborate with additional manufacturers of AI-first inspection equipment to provide deeper on-the-ground AI integration, the company said in a statement last Friday.
In order to improve factory-wide decisions in real time, it will also invest in next-generation research and development (R&D)—moving from isolated inspection tools to line-level intelligence, where multiple machines communicate with one another via artificial intelligence.
The statement claims that chipmakers are rushing to create smaller, more sophisticated chips with much less margin for error as demand rises from artificial intelligence (AI), 5G, the internet of things (IoT), and electric vehicles.
“Making a single chip is one of the most demanding feats in modern manufacturing — it happens in cleanrooms thousands of times cleaner than hospital operating rooms and relies on precise coordination across hundreds of machines and thousands of ultra-sensitive steps,
“Imagine trying to build a skyscraper out of microscopic Lego blocks, where a tiny shift in one brick — invisible to the eye — can collapse the whole structure. That’s what chip factories face every day,” said Akanksha Jagwani, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of SixSense.
It is acknowledged that it can be difficult to identify early warning indicators of failure before they develop into expensive flaws or delays, which is where artificial intelligence comes in handy.
Engineers Akanksha Jagwani and Avni Agarwal founded SixSense to address one of the largest problems facing the semiconductor industry: converting raw production data, such as equipment signals and defect images, into real-time intelligence that enables factories to increase throughput, prevent quality problems, and produce more high-quality chips from the same line.
Engineers can address issues by using the early warnings provided by SixSense AI.
The platform helps factories move from reactive inspection to proactive control by analyzing vast amounts of production data to identify, categorize, and forecast failure patterns.
Manufacturers can improve usable output (i.e., yield) by avoiding over-rejecting good chips, detecting rare, minor, and critical defects that humans frequently overlook, and anticipating process drifts before they lead to larger failures.
“Unlike traditional AI tools, SixSense is hardware-agnostic, explainable, and built for engineers — not data scientists,
“Process engineers can fine-tune models using their own fab data, deploy them in under two days, and trust the results — all without writing a single line of code. That’s what makes the platform both powerful and practical,” said Avni Agarwal, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer.
