Nexstrom, a Singapore-based semiconductor materials startup, announced on September 22, 2026 that it raised $12 million in a seed round led by Xora Innovation, with Foothill Ventures and SEEDS (an arm of SG Growth Capital) joining the investment. The company has raised $15 million in total as of September 2026, including $3 million in non-dilutive funding.
The capital will fund what the company describes as the industry's first 12-inch single-crystal 2D semiconductor growth platform. It's a manufacturing challenge that has bedeviled the chip industry for years: materials like tungsten diselenide show enormous promise in lab settings but have stubbornly resisted the transition to commercial chip fabrication.
Nexstrom builds chemical vapor deposition systems that can grow transition metal dichalcogenide materials on 300mm wafers at quality levels foundries might actually use. The company's flagship product, the North Star platform, is a 12-inch cold-wall CVD system initially focused on p-type tungsten diselenide. According to the company's website, it features engineered precursor delivery and multi-channel thermal control designed to slot into existing fab infrastructure.
"Silicon has fueled decades of computing innovation, but the industry now needs a new materials platform to continue scaling performance," said Dr. Lain-Jong Li, co-founder and chief scientist. "For years, the challenge has not been demonstrating the promise of 2D materials, but manufacturing them at the scale and quality advanced foundries require."
The skepticism in his framing is warranted. Two-dimensional materials have cycled through hype and disappointment before.
The Long Road to Production
CEO Phoebe Tan told TechCrunch that the company's 12-inch system "has just been installed." Nexstrom has progressed from two-inch to six-inch wafers. It plans to complete eight-inch processing by the end of October, according to the interview published September 22. Commercial production readiness is estimated between 2030 and 2035, according to TechCrunch.
That timeline might seem distant, but it aligns with how slowly foundry-grade equipment tends to mature. Nexstrom says it has already delivered wafer samples to unnamed industry partners within 18 months of launch.
The startup's pedigree suggests it understands what foundries need. Li previously served as corporate research director at TSMC and now holds professorships at the National University of Singapore's materials science and engineering department. Co-founder Tan doubles as a partner at Xora Innovation, the lead investor in this round.
Nexstrom's executive roster includes Chin Kah Fai, co-founder of 3D printing company Structo, now serving as chief of staff. Dr. Ang-Yu Lu, formerly a principal engineer at TSMC, leads systems development. Dr. Jing-Kai Huang, an ex-assistant professor at City University of Hong Kong, heads R&D.
Industry Momentum, Maybe
Nexstrom is chasing a gap between academic research on 2D materials and the punishing demands of fab-ready manufacturing. In June, imec, ASML and TSMC presented a 300mm integration route for 2D n- and p-FETs with 50nm contacted poly pitch at the IEEE/JSAP VLSI Symposium. The presentation signaled that major chipmakers are at least engineering process flows for these materials, even if volume production remains years away.
Other equipment makers are circling adjacent pieces of the manufacturing puzzle. Germany's AIXTRON runs MOCVD platforms for 2D growth projects. A startup called CDimension focuses on molybdenum disulfide device work, TechCrunch reported.
Board advisor H-S. Philip Wong, the Willard R. and Inez Kerr Bell Professor at Stanford, noted in the announcement that "the industry needs high-quality, uniform 2D materials on 300mm substrates, and solving that materials bottleneck is exactly where Nexstrom is focused."
Whether the industry truly needs these materials, or merely finds them interesting, remains an open question.
Deployment Plans
Nexstrom will use the fresh capital to push equipment closer to commercial production, improve process control and metrology, expand headcount, and support validation work with prospective customers, according to TechCrunch. The company operates from the Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise in Singapore. Public registry data shows it incorporated in December 2023, making it roughly nine months old at the time of the funding announcement.
Xora Innovation, Nexstrom's lead investor and incubator, is a Temasek-owned early-stage deep-tech platform. Foothill Ventures, based in Los Altos, California, invests in frontier technologies including advanced manufacturing. The startup lists between 11 and 50 employees on LinkedIn, though pinning down exact headcount at fast-moving startups often proves tricky.
For now, Nexstrom's bet is straightforward: if the chip industry's scaling roadmap truly demands new materials, someone will need to figure out how to make them. The company is placing itself at that chokepoint, with a long timeline and deep-pocketed backers willing to wait.
