Floadia from Japan Raises ¥1.05 Billion in Series D, Total at ¥4.95 Billion

Floadia Corporation, which develops embedded flash memory IP cores based in the Tokyo suburb of Kodaira-shi, has raised approximately ¥1.05 billion in series D round.

As a first closing, Inabata & Co., Ltd. headquartered in Chuo-ku, Osaka, Japan, and Cypress Capital, a Hong Kong investment company, underwrote an allotment of capital for a total of ¥850 million.

Including the ¥200 million raised through venture debt (loan with stock acquisition rights) from Japan Finance Corporation in March 2023, the total amount raised in this round was approximately ¥1.05 billion yen.

Floadia will use the funds raised to strengthen sales activities promoting its current primary business, embedded flash memory IP cores, to semiconductor manufacturers, and to enhance developing low power consumption AI accelerator chips that utilize flash memory devices. 

Inabata, which participated in this round, operates a range of businesses overseas in the information and electronics, chemicals, consumer goods industry and plastics sector, and plans to utilize the network to support Floadia’s sales overseas.

Floadia is in the business of licensing the processes and circuit design necessary for manufacturing flash memory, a type of non-volatile memory (memory that stores data even when the power is turned off), to semiconductor manufacturers as intellectual property (IP). Its flash memory IP cores are mainly used in microcontrollers, power semiconductors, sensors, etc., and require lower power consumption than conventional flash memory IP cores, and can be integrated into chips at low cost.

“G1,” the first flash memory IP developed by the company, has been used in microcontrollers at Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation, and passed quality standards that allow data retention for 10 years at 125°C after 10,000 program and erase operations at Taiwanese foundry TSMC.

The IP was tested at even higher temperature of 200°C, and was confirmed to retain data for 10 years, the highest quality in the world.

Floadia is developing Computing in Memory (CIM) chips, which use flash memory devices as information transmission media, as a pillar of the next business following flash memory IP cores. Current AI calculation is mainly performed on large-scale servers located in the cloud such as data centers, but in addition to issues such as data security and latency, there are concerns about increased power consumption at data centers. Therefore, AI calculation processing on the terminal (edge) is required. Firm’s flash memory solves these issues with analog memory technology and enables advanced AI inference calculations in edge environments with low power consumption.

The manufacturer has so far received approximately ¥3.9 billion from INCJ (Japanese government fund), UMC Capital (Taiwan), an affiliated company of major foundry UMC, Faraday Technology (Taiwan), a semiconductor design company, and Teijin Limited, a Japanese chemical firm. Adding the amount raised in this round, the cumulative total raised to date is approximately ¥4.95 billion yen.
 
About Floadia Corporation
It was established in 2011 by engineers who had been developing embedded non-volatile memory for over 20 years at Hitachi, Ltd., and Renesas Technology (currently Renesas Electronics Corporation). It licenses to semiconductor manufacturers as IP the processes and circuit designs necessary for manufacturing embedded non-volatile memory (memory that retains its contents even when the power is turned off) used in microcontrollers, power semiconductors, sensors, etc. Firm’s non-volatile memory technology consumes only 1/1,000,000 of the power required to write and erase data, as compared to competitors’ memory technologies, and has excellent high temperature tolerance, and requires only 1/3 of the additional cost to integrate into a chip. Because of these features, G1 has already been installed in automotive microcontrollers by domestic semiconductor manufacturers and has also been adopted by a foundry in Taiwan, where it is used as embedded memory in smartphone components.