Unisers secures investment totaling 14 million US dollars

The Zurich-based start-up Unisers has raised 14 million US dollars in seed funding after successfully closing its first financing round. This will enable the company to deliver first demo machines to chip manufacturers, further details of which can be found in a LinkedIn article posted to the company’s profile.

The financing round was led by Intel Capital, while M Ventures, Swisscom Ventures and RSBG Ventures all acted as co-investors. “Each investor will support us strongly on individual domains and hence help us on our journey to become a critical player for the whole semiconductor manufacturing world”, the company writes in its LinkedIn post.

With its technology, Unisers recognizes extremely small foreign particles in the manufacturing process of semiconductor chips. Spotting these is necessary to prevent contamination during the production of semiconductor chips, which ultimately helps to avoid these having to be destroyed. In turn, this improves the environmental footprint of the chip factories and protects against losses that could potentially run into the billions. Until now, determining the source of such contaminations has been both a costly and time-consuming process.

The spin-off from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH) uses surface-enhancing Raman scattering in its particle monitoring platform. This enables a higher yield because the method employed by Unisers is able to detect the size, concentration and chemical composition of particles with the highest sensitivity and molecular specificity.

“Unisers is drastically reducing the time it takes to find the source of contamination by detecting particles that were previously undetectable, unlocking new opportunities to conserve our chip supply through better contamination identification capabilities”, explains Jennifer Ard, Managing Director and Head of Investment Operations at Intel Capital, in a press release issued by Swisscom. ko