Xcena, a chip startup with offices in South Korea and the US, has raised US$135 million in a series B at a US$570 million valuation to develop chips that move some data processing closer to DRAM.

Seoul-based venture capital firms Altinum and IMM Investment co-led the round, alongside Corstone Asia and existing investors SBI Investment and Mirae Asset Capital, bringing Xcena’s total funding to US$185 million.

Founded in 2022 by chief executive Jin Kim, CTO Dohun Kim, and CPO Harry Juhyun Kim, all veterans of Samsung and SK Hynix, the startup said its MX1 prototype connects to the central processing unit over CXL (Compute Express Link).

It handles preprocessing, key-value cache management, and data caching within the memory module, instead of sending those tasks back and forth between central processing units, graphics processing units, and memory.

Industry analyses say large language model inference becomes memory-bound in the decode phase, when systems repeatedly read model weights and key-value cache data one token at a time.

The company said mass-production chips are due to roll off Samsung’s foundry lines by the end of 2026, with revenue expected in 2027, as the AI hardware market is shifting toward memory bandwidth and proximity as performance constraints.

🔗 Source: TechCrunch