Pragmatic Semiconductor increases Series C funding to $125 million

New investment supports continued growth towards vision of electronics in everything

December 14, 2022 -- Pragmatic Semiconductor, a world leader in flexible electronics, is proud to announce that it has secured $35 million additional investment from high quality institutional investors. This brings the total raised in its Series C round to $125 million, oversubscribing the original target by more than 50%. Investors have been attracted by the massive potential for Pragmatic’s unique, flexible integrated circuits to replace mainstream silicon chips, as well as to enable trillions of smart items in applications that would never be possible with silicon.

The extra funding will be used to accelerate and expand Pragmatic’s growth plans. This includes the company’s second fabrication line (FlexLogic-002), which will increase production capacity by more than 5 times, and its new 15-acre Pragmatic Park site in Durham in the Northeast of England. In addition, the company has doubled its footprint in Cambridge with an option to double again within the next year.

New investors include British Patient Capital, a commercial subsidiary of British Business Bank plc, the UK government’s economic development bank; and In-Q-Tel, which invests in high-tech companies to advance technology capabilities for the U.S. intelligence community and its allies. This highlights the strategic importance of Pragmatic’s ground-breaking semiconductor technology platform at a time when governments around the world are focused on ensuring secure control of supply chains for critical electronic components.

Commenting on their investment, Catherine Lewis La Torre, CEO of British Patient Capital, said: “Pragmatic is another great example of a UK company which has developed and commercialised world-leading technology from a UK base. We are delighted to be investing in the further growth of this homegrown semiconductor manufacturing business via Future Fund: Breakthrough, our dedicated deeptech fund which is investing in some of the country’s most innovative and dynamic businesses.”

Additional new investors include Prosperity7 Ventures (the diversified growth fund under Aramco Ventures), the North East Development Capital Fund and the Finance Durham Fund (both managed by Maven Capital Partners).

Scott White, CEO of Pragmatic said, “This oversubscribed investment round, in spite of the challenging macroeconomic conditions, is a huge vote of confidence in Pragmatic’s unique technology and business traction. Our signature ultra low cost, flexible form factor, fast production cycle time and minimal carbon footprint address key challenges across the industry, allowing rapid time-to-market for novel electronics applications as well as enabling localisation of semiconductor manufacturing and driving towards net-zero product lifecycles.”

Erik Langaker, Chair of Pragmatic added, “We continue to see growing investor and customer interest in affordable solutions for digitisation and control of supply chains, reinforced by government initiatives such as the recent EU legislation regarding Digital Product Passports. This is the beginning of electronics in everything – supported by great technology developed and scaled in the UK.”

About Pragmatic Semiconductor

Pragmatic Semiconductor is a leader in semiconductor innovation, creating ultra low cost, ultra thin, flexible integrated circuits (‘electronic chips’).

Pragmatic’s chip is produced without silicon, using thin-film semiconductors to create flexible integrated circuits that are thinner than a human hair, and are significantly cheaper and faster to produce than silicon chips. This provides a compelling alternative for many mainstream electronics applications, as well as enabling new applications not possible with silicon.

Pragmatic’s chips can be embedded into almost anything, bringing connectivity and intelligence to everyday objects. Example applications include radio frequency identification (RFID) and near field communications (NFC) giving objects unique digital identities as well as enabling objects to interact with their environment. This has benefits across the entire product lifecycle, including inventory reduction, traceability, counterfeit detection, proof of provenance, and customer interaction. Pragmatic’s technology can also be used to help reduce food waste, improve the return and recycling of singleuse packaging, and enable item-level traceability within a universal system for recapture, sorting, cleaning, and return.

Our foundry service uniquely allows agile hardware design, exponentially accelerating solution development and time-to-market. Examples include proprietary RFID protocols, time/temperature indicators, fingerprint sensors, wearable smart patches for healthcare, flexible display drivers, and novel microprocessor architectures.

We also offer a Fab-as-a-Service model that enables secure, dependable, localised semiconductor supply through manufacturing directly on a customer’s site. This highly scalable distributed production allows costeffective, high-volume fabrication of flexible integrated circuits.

Pragmatic is headquartered in Cambridge, UK, with our first fab operating in Sedgefield, and a second fab under construction at our new 15-acre Pragmatic Park site in Durham.