CXL Fabless Startup Panmnesia Secures Over $60M in Series A Funding, Aiming to Lead the CXL Switch Silicon Chip and CXL IP

The Largest Series A Venture Capital Investment in the South Korean Fabless Industry During Tough Investment Climate

Seoul, South Korea – November 21, 2024 – Panmnesia, a South Korean fabless CXL startup, announced that it has successfully secured over $60M in Series A funding. The valuation of the company exceeds $250M. This represents the largest Series A venture capital investment to date for any fabless startup headquartered in South Korea. With this latest round, Panmnesia has successfully raised more than $80M totally in cumulative investment, a mix of private and public funding, within approximately two years since its founding.

Panmnesia’s CEO, Myoungsoo Jung, stated that the funds from this round will be used to complete key projects, including the manufacturing of the CXL 3.1 Switch silicon chip, advancement of CXL IP, and collaboration with global IT companies.

Panmnesia: A Startup Leading CXL Solutions

Panmnesia, which successfully secured Series A funding, is a fabless startup developing solutions for efficient memory expansion. Although the company has various product lineups, such as solutions for data centers and AI, Panmnesia is currently focusing on developing semiconductor IP (Intellectual Property) and switch chips for CXL (Compute Express Link), the next-generation memory interconnect technology.

Panmnesia was founded in 2022 by CEO Myoungsoo Jung, a tenured professor at KAIST, along with master’s and Ph. D. researchers from KAIST. Since then, the company has welcomed many young engineers and experienced professionals from global semiconductor companies to collaborate on the development of advanced CXL products. Driven by its memory expansion technology, which has been in development since 2015, Panmnesia has experienced rapid growth and recently leveraged this momentum to successfully complete its Series A funding.

An Unprecedented Scale of Series A Investment During the Venture Capital Freeze

The current investment climate is notably challenging. According to a report from CrunchBase, the first quarter of this year marked the second-lowest global startup funding quarter since 2018. Furthermore, KPMG highlighted that global VC investments in Q3 2024 reached their lowest point in seven years. In these challenging conditions, Panmnesia's recent Series A funding round stands out as a remarkable achievement, raising over $60M solely through VC investment.

Team Panmnesia

A total of 15 venture investment institutions participated in this Series A funding, led by InterVest and joined by new investors such as Korea Investment Partners, KB Investment, Woori Venture Partners, BSK Investment, Nvestor, Murex Partners, Daesung Private Equity, and TS Investment. Existing investors, including Daekyo Investment, GNTech Venture Capital, SL Investment, TimeWorks Investment, Quantum Ventures Korea, and Yuanta Investment Korea, also participated in this round. Notably, Daekyo Investment and Quantum Ventures Korea expressed strong confidence in Panmnesia’s steady growth by making their largest investment since their founding.

A representative from the Korean investment market remarked, “This is the largest VC funding I’ve seen in this field. Notably, in this Series A round, approximately half of Korea's top ten venture investment institutions by assets under management (AUM) participated simultaneously. This is an exceptional case that underscores the investment industry’s strong interest in Panmnesia.”

Example Architecture That Can Be Built with Panmnesia’s CXL Solutions.

Reasons Behind Successful Investment Attraction: ‘Leading CXL Technology’

Panmnesia identified ‘world-leading technology’ as the primary reason for its successful fundraising. Panmnesia’s technology has always been associated with the term ‘world's first.’ This began when Panmnesia introduced the world’s first CXL full-system framework including the CXL Switch, at the 2022 USENIX Annual Conference. More recently, at the OCP/OpenInfra joint event, the company once again surprised the industry by unveiling the world's first CXL 3.1 IP with two-digit nanosecond latency and the world’s first CXL-GPU.

Panmnesia also put much effort into validating and advancing its CXL solutions. For instance, during a keynote speech last July, the company revealed the silicon-proven CXL 3.1 controller chip as a demonstration of these efforts. Nowadays, Panmnesia is collaborating with global IT companies by utilizing its advanced CXL solutions.

A Panmnesia representative commented, “The success of this fundraising round was made possible because investment institutions recognized and highly valued Panmnesia's globally leading CXL technology.”

Utilization Plan for Series A Funds

Regarding the utilization of funds from this investment round, CEO Jung stated, “We will allocate the investment to successfully complete key projects, such as manufacturing of the high-bandwidth CXL 3.1 Switch silicon chip, advancement of next-generation CXL IP, and collaboration projects with global IT companies. I hope that everyone participating in this journey will be recognized and receive attention as a main contributor to the unprecedented success.”

Panmnesia’s Key Milestones

Panmnesia’s CXL 3.1 IP - 1

Panmnesia’s CXL 3.1 IP - 2

Panmnesia’s CXL 3.1 Switch