Australian chip manufacturing startup Syenta Inc. announced it has raised $26 million in Series A funding. Playground Global and Australia’s National Reconstruction Fund led the round, joined by Investible, Salus Ventures, Jelix Ventures, and Wollemi Capital. Pat Gelsinger, former CEO of Intel Corp., has joined Syenta's board.
Syenta's new technology, localized electrochemical manufacturing (LEM), aims to produce faster and more cost-efficient chip interconnects. This process compresses fabrication time from hours to minutes by combining deposition and patterning into a single step, potentially boosting chipmaker production volumes.
Traditional chip manufacturing involves depositing metal layers onto silicon wafers, followed by a patterning stage to shape these layers. Syenta's LEM technology utilizes an electrode with patterned surfaces, acting as a stamp to deposit metal layers and simultaneously perform patterning. This integrated approach enables the creation of "sub-micron" links, smaller than existing technologies, leading to faster processors.
"We’re enabling finer-pitch connections within existing manufacturing infrastructure, allowing systems to move more data more efficiently and at a lower cost without requiring entirely new fabrication approaches," said Syenta co-founder and CEO Jekaterina Viktorova. The company has opened an office in Arizona to advance commercialization and plans for volume production of interconnects to begin in 2028.
Syenta anticipates its technology will be particularly beneficial for artificial intelligence chip suppliers, as AI models heavily rely on fast data transfer between memory and processing circuits.