Senscomm – a fabless semiconductor startup, founded in 2018 headquartered in Suzhou, China, announced it has successfully raised over 300M RMB last month in an oversubscribed Series A2-round financing. The round has been led by strategic financial investor PingAn, followed by several other well known investors and existing investors such as USI, SL Capital, Glory Ventures, Oriza, Gallizul, Leader VC.
Senscomm was the first company in mainland China developing Wi-Fi 6 chipsets by veterans from the Silicon Valley and South Korea. Since founding, it has evolved to become the leading Wi-Fi 6 & Wi-Fi 7 chipset vendor in mainland China and has been successfully sampling its fully in-house developed Wi-Fi 6 chipsets to key customers, expanding its world-class engineering team to over 120+ employees, which includes world-class engineers for RF/Analog, core baseband technology, SoC and Software.
The new fund will mainly be used to prepare mass production of several chipsets within this year, in addition to sampling China’s first Wi-Fi 7 ready AP Router chipset, as well as to further expand its engineering, marketing and sales teams worldwide.
Besides mass producing several Wi-Fi 6 Station SoCs, the company is developing cost-effective royalty-free Next Generation Wi-Fi 7 ready AP SoCs based on fully in-house developed baseband & RF technology, which are in strong demand in China as well as worldwide.
Senscomm’s Product families include the Station Wi-Fi segment for IPC, STB, TV, and notebook; the AIoT Wi-Fi segment, industrial applications as well as the broadband AP Wi-Fi segment for home & enterprise gateways, routers, and mesh applications.
“Senscomm highly appreciates the recognition of our new strategic investors who have rigorously tested our first sample chipsets and decided to invest into Senscomm and leading our latest round of investment.? We believe together with our valued partners such as Xiaomi, USI, etc., Senscomm is well positioned to develop market driven products and lead the way to become the leading company for connectivity chipsets”, said Michael Lee, CEO of Senscomm.
Hoi Tung, Chairman and CEO of China Ping An Insurance Overseas (Holdings) Limited, said: “Looking back at the past decade, the rapid development of global Internet has benefited from continuous iteration and evolution of basic communication facilities. Wireless communication technologies, such as 5G and Wi-Fi, have profoundly impacted our lives. All wireless devices require Radio Frequency and Base Band parts to transmit wireless signals. With its top-ranked technical teams in these fields, Senscomm has successfully taped out and mass-produced its first Wi-Fi 6 2×2 Station chip last year, showing its strong technical strength and team cohesion. We expect Senscomm to further promote the development of domestic wireless communication technology, providing consumers with faster and more stable services and enhanced experience. Also, Ping An Overseas Holdings will promote deeper integration of Senscomm into Ping An’s ecosystem.”
Mr. Jinpeng Shi, SVP of Strategic Investment for USI commented, “USI has vast expertise in the application of SiP technology for the designing and manufacturing of RF modules, serving some of the best-known consumer electronics brand globally. Senscomm’s team has a strong R&D background coupled with a profound understanding of the market, and a leadership with global mindset. USI wishes to deepen collaboration with Senscomm. By leveraging Senscomm’s strong base band technology self-development capability, its great value-for-money Wi-Fi 6 product and pipeline products, USI wishes to collaborate with Senscomm on its product applications and turn innovative technologies into value for customers.
Senscomm believes that its biggest advantage is of having developed the entire chipset in-house, including the entire baseband (PHY/MAC) as well as in-house developed RF via our world-class R&D team worldwide. Whereas most fabless startups within mainland China usually licensing the core Wi-Fi IP. Although this licensing approach leads to much faster time-to-market, however to become a leading Tier-1 vendor, such approach has significant limitations to achieve worldclass Wi-Fi performance, create competitive roadmaps as well as difficulties to adapt to the various different wireless applications, optimizing and ensuring worldwide interoperability with other Tier-1 vendors’ Wi-Fi chipsets/devices/routers.
Senscomm is also the only startup in mainland China being actively engaged in the international IEEE standardization as well as actively increasing its patent portfolios on next-generation Wi-Fi 7 standard.
Same as all technologies, Wi-Fi is keeping evolving to be better. Every 4~5 years in average there is a new Wi-Fi standard being ratified and getting adopted, and each newer standard is compatible with the old ones. WFA(Wi-Fi Alliance?) introduces a new naming system to identify Wi-Fi generations by a numerical sequence in 2018 which is easier to remember and use. So WFA defined Wi-Fi 5 for IEEE802.11ac (ratified in 2014), Wi-Fi 6 for IEEE802.11ax (ratified in 2019), and Wi-Fi 7 for IEEE802.11be (expected to be ratified in 2024). The changes from Wi-Fi 5 to Wi-Fi 6 are mostly about the improvements at “efficiency” and “coexistence” (such as OFDMA, MU-MIMO, and etc). The changes from Wi-Fi 6 to Wi-Fi 7 are mostly about “very high speed” (such as 4K QAM, 320MHz bandwidth and MIMO with 16 space streams). Just like all evolving technologies, it is expected the Wi-Fi 7 would be adopted by key major features first and then optional features to follow.
About Ping An Insurance Overseas
China Ping An Insurance Overseas (Holdings) Co., Ltd. is a wholly owned subsidiary of China Ping An Insurance (Group) Co., Ltd. (“Ping An Group”). Ping An Overseas Holdings and its subsidiaries are the major overseas investment and asset management business platforms of Ping An Group. With outstanding overseas investment research and portfolio management capabilities, Ping An Overseas Holdings is committed to providing customers with a series of overseas investment products, asset management and consulting services, covering capital market investment services, including stocks, fixed income, funds in hedge funds and Open-end/closed-end fund, ETF and special account management in artificial intelligence and quantitative investment, as well as providing alternative investment services, including global private equity, private debt, infrastructure and real estate fund investment, co-investment and direct investment.
About USI
USI (SSE: 601231, A constituent of CSI300 Index), Universal Scientific Industrial (Shanghai) Co., Ltd., is a global leader in electronic design and manufacturing as well as a leader in the field of SiP (System-in-Package) modules. USI provides D(MS)2 product services: Design, Manufacturing, Miniaturization, Industrial software and hardware Solutions, and material procurement, logistics and maintenance Services. With Asteelflash, USI has 27 sales, production and service locations across four continents of Asia, Europe, Americas and Africa, and offers customer diversified products in the sectors of wireless communication, computer and storage, consumer, industrial, medical and automotive electronics worldwide. USI is one of the subsidiaries of ASE Technology Holding Co., Ltd. (TWSE: 3711, NYSE: ASX) which is a world-leading provider of semiconductor manufacturing services in assembly and test in the world. For more information, please visit www.usiglobal.com or follow us on LinkedIn or WeChat.
About Senscomm
Senscomm Semiconductor Co., LTD is a fabless wireless semiconductor company headquartered in the central area of CBD by Jinji Lake in Suzhou Industrial Park, and has owned subsidiaries in South Korea, USA, Singapore, and Ireland to integrate global talent and resources. Senscomm’s vision and mission are reinventing wireless connectivity and human-computer interactions to connect the world. Senscomm had won numerous honors and awards: Suzhou Industrial Park Leading Talent, Jinji Lake Craftsman, Gusu Leader, Jiangsu Province Innovative and Entrepreneurial Talent, National Unicorn Enterprise, Park Nursery (Key Enterprise), …, etc. For more information, go to foxconncom.cn.
