Nantero, Inc., the nanotechnology company pioneering the use of carbon nanotubes in the development of next-generation semiconductor devices, today announced the closing of an over $10 million Series D financing round. The oversubscribed round was led by two new strategic corporate investors currently engaged in strategic development and partnerships with Nantero.
The round also includes existing investors, including Charles River Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Globespan Capital Partners, Stata Venture Partners and Harris & Harris Group. This latest round of funding comes at a significant juncture as the company transitions from development to commercialization of its next-generation memory, NRAM™, and licensees begin to bring Nantero's technology to market.
"Nantero is making the next generation of memory a reality as it enters the commercialization phase of its NRAM technology," said Bruce Sachs, General Partner, Charles River Ventures. "After substantial development in multiple production fabs, NRAM has demonstrated its value to several prominent customers and is on track to soon come to market as both a standalone and embedded memory."
During the past year, Nantero has entered into multiple partnerships with major corporations planning to commercialize NRAM. Nantero has already fabricated highyielding 4Mb arrays of NRAM in CMOS production environments, with several important performance advantages, including speeds comparable to DRAM, low operating power, permanent nonvolatility and non-destructive read, expected unlimited endurance and superior high temperature retention. These 4Mb arrays have been fabricated on vias as small as 15nm to demonstrate NRAM's superior scalability, which is projected to extend even below 5nm. In addition to these commercial partnerships, Nantero also has a partnership with Imec, a world-leading research institution in nanoelectronics, which is focusing on developing Nantero's carbon-nanotube-based memory for high-density, next-generation memories with a size less than 20nm.
Greg Schmergel, co-founder and CEO of Nantero, Inc., added, "This round will help us support our partners that are bringing NRAM into production in the near term. We are excited to be working with multiple forward-looking industry leaders that see the value NRAM can bring."