By Greg Gao
KONSEMI(康芯威), a Chinese developer of storage technology and chips affiliated with home appliance giant Konka, recently secured RMB200 million($31.44 million) in Series A funding,the company announced.
Leading investors for this round of funding are Veiglo, Guangzhou Science City Group, Vista Investment, Guoyuan Fund, and CITIC New Future Investment.
Established in November 2018 and based in Hefei of eastern China’s Anhui Province, KONSEMI focuses on “front-end storage technology development, program output, chip design, semiconductor distribution” as its main business. It is a subsidiary of Konka Group – the leading Chinese TV and home appliance manufacturer.
Since its establishment, KONSEMI has been committed to filling the domestic gap in storage technology and competing with international storage giants such as Toshiba, Samsung, SK Hynix. It has a product portfolio covering eMMC, UFS, and SSD which are widely used in TV, set-top boxes, mobile phones, and other markets.
The company launched its 5.1 series eMMC controllers at the end of 2019, and the products were mass produced in 2020. It will start R&D on its UFS products this year, and release samples in 2023, said KONSEMI.
KONSEMI’s shipment of memory controller chips exceeded 3 million in 2021, setting a record for the fastest growth in domestic controller chip shipments over the same period. They are adopted by first-tier brands such as ZTE, Unionman, and Elitegroup Computer Systems, with annual sales in 2022 expected to exceed 15 million units.
The company built a strong technical team with the core members from Samsung, Intel, Kioxia, Spreadtrum, HiSilicon and other established storage players. They have rich experience in flash memory such as eMMC/UFS/SSD and strong R&D capabilities in storage controllers.
The rapid development of technologies such as 5G and AI continues to expand data storage demands, and consumer memory has ushered in rapid growth. The semiconductor memory device market is mainly dominated by overseas companies such as Samsung, SK Hynix, Western Digital, and Kioxia for a long time, and Chinese suppliers have little market share. Since 2016, China’s IC industry has attached great importance to the memory technology with favored government policy support. Now quite a number of outstanding storage companies have emerged in China, and KONSEMI is one of the new stars worthy of attention, said one industry observer.（校对|WM Zhang）
