Written by Martyn Warwick
In a boost for the British chip sector, Cambridge, UK-based Pragmatic Semiconductor has secured £182m (US$228m) in a new round of funding that will help the company expand its operations to meet growing demand for its flexible integrated circuits.
The funding round is, to date, the biggest venture financing for a European semiconductor company and will permit Pragmatic to wrest the position of the UK’s largest semiconductor manufacturer by volume from the current leader, Newport Wafer Fab in South Wales (of which more later…).
Of the latest investment, £162m in Series D funding is already secured while a further £20m is guaranteed from an additional round limited to key investors. More than 70% of the funding came from UK investors, with the fund management specialist M&G Investments in the vanguard together with the state-owned UK Infrastructure Bank. Another key investor is Northern Gritstone, an investment fund set up in a partnership between Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield universities to support the commercialisation of science and intellectual property (IP)-rich companies spinning out from the three universities and to help fund the development of similar high-tech businesses across the North of England.
