Chip Company Witmem Raises CNY 200 Million from Series B++ Funding Round

 

On January 6, 36 Krypton learned that Witmem Technology, a storage and computing chip company, announced completing a 200 million RMB Series B2 financing round. This funding round was led by Guotou Venture, followed by Shuimu Chunjin Capital, LH Ventures continued additional investment, and Index Capital acted as the exclusive financial advisor. This funding will be mainly used for mass production of in-store computing chips and new product development to expand the scale of industrialization on the ground.

Witmem Technology was founded in 2017 and is a company 36 Krypton has been following for a long time. Witmem Technology has now released and mass-produced two generations of products, the WTM1001, a storage and computing accelerator, and the WTM2101, a storage in-computing SoC chip. In 2022, Witmem Technology announced the completion of a 200 million RMB B1 round of financing and a 100 million RMB B1+ round of funding in January and September, respectively.

With Moore's Law gradually failing, the storage and computing all-in-one technology that can solve the problems of bandwidth, latency, and power consumption generated by the storage wall has revealed its advantages, especially in 2022, which is of great concern to the industry. Discussions around the development of each technology route have also become one of the hot spots in the industry.

Witmem Technology was one of the first companies in China to engage in the development of in-store computing technology and chips, choosing to cut its teeth on Flash memory. In 2022, Witmem has made rapid progress and has been the first to reach the stage of mass production and concrete application of the chip.

In March 2022, Witmem 's mass-produced in-store computing SoC chip, WTM2101, was officially launched and shipped in May. In less than a year, the WTM2101 has been commercially available on the end-side of TWS headphones, hearing aids, AR glasses, and intelligent home control, providing AI processing solutions such as voice and lightweight video.

In the field of hearing aids, for example, consumers' most significant functional demand for hearing aids is to enhance the human voice to facilitate communication, which can implement through AI algorithms. Still, the arithmetic power required to run the algorithms cannot be satisfied based on previous chips, and hearing aids also have high requirements for low latency. The high arithmetic power and low power consumption of Witmem WTM2101 and the advantage of latency control within ten milliseconds are the core reasons for attracting and rapidly opening up the hearing aid market.

Regarding the market advantages of WTM2101, Wang Shaodi, founder and CEO of Witmem Technology, told 36 Krypton: "In different fields, facing different customer needs, the advantages highlighted by WTM2101 are also slightly different. Smart home and other larger device areas, its advantage is low power consumption, not only can miniaturize large devices but also greatly improve the device's standby time."

In 2023, Witmem will expand the application scenarios of the WTM 2101 chip, spreading from the current audio field to health devices, medical devices, industrial positioning, and other systems.

Another important chip sequence of Witmem Technology, the WTM-8 series, will be launched at the end of 2023 at the earliest. Its arithmetic power will be 500-600 times higher than that of the WTM 2101, mainly applied to 4K-8K video real-time processing, which has already completed the chip casting and has been approved by head customers in several fields, and customers have already cooperation.

The main application markets for WTM-8 are medium and large computing scenarios in the video direction. The complementary market focus on end-side large-calculus procedures without reasonable solutions, such as imaging and display in 2D and 3D for mobile devices, removing devices, XR, and handheld devices.

Taking video as an example, according to Shaodi Wang, as the imaging resolution and frame rate increase, the amount of data and computation is high in both 2D and 3D, which conventional chips cannot handle under heat dissipation limitations. In contrast, the WTM-8 series chips can do it well, with application scenarios including HD imaging, positioning, and display applications.

In terms of future product planning for the WTM-8, Witmem Technology will differentiate between dedicated application scenarios and comprehensive scenarios with multiple requirements and will conduct research and development for both low and high-end versions of the chip.

In addition to chip products, the accumulation of software development tools has also been a significant progress for Cognizant Technology in the past year. In Wang Shaodi's opinion, application tools for software development will be a core competency for the development of Cunningham computing chip companies in the future. Serving customers and applying the chip to products requires a tremendous amount of work to efficiently transform the customer's applications to run on the chip and successfully implement the migration. In the process of implementing WTM2101, Witmem has already accumulated rich experience. According to Wang Shaodi, Witmem Technology will release a new set of complete chip development tools and IDE environment with the WTM-8 series chip to help customers do more efficient and convenient development.

For 2023, Wang Shaodi said: Firstly, we will continue to make the WTM2101 chip realistic in existing scenarios, and secondly, we will expand our mass production products to more application scenarios based on the previous ones. To deliver more certainty to the future and bring good signals and changes to the industry.