The Singapore-based startup claims its atomically thin materials could deliver 100x carrier mobility gains over silicon at sub-1nm thickness
A semiconductor startup that’s barely a year old just landed $12 million to build the machines that could make silicon obsolete. Nexstrom, founded in Singapore in December 2023, is developing equipment to manufacture two-dimensional semiconductor materials at wafer scale, targeting the kind of ultra-low-power chips that AI workloads are increasingly demanding.
The round was led by Xora Innovation, a venture firm connected to Temasek, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund.
What Nexstrom is actually building
Nexstrom’s bet is on transition metal dichalcogenides, or TMDs, a class of materials like molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) that remain functional even when they’re just a few atoms thick.
The company uses proprietary Metal-Organic Chemical Vapour Deposition (MOCVD) systems to grow these materials. Nexstrom claims to have achieved an industry first: producing monocrystalline 2D films on 300mm wafers. That’s the standard wafer size used in today’s advanced chip fabs.
The performance numbers the company is touting are striking. At sub-1nm thickness, Nexstrom reports 100x carrier mobility compared to conventional approaches, along with over 50% improvement in power efficiency versus leading-edge silicon technologies.
The team and its academic roots
Nexstrom is led by co-founder and CEO Dr. Phoebe Tan, who also serves as a partner at Xora Innovation. Co-founder and Chief Scientist Dr. Lance Li has been working on growing 2D materials since 2012.
The company has established collaborations with researchers at Purdue University, the National University of Singapore (NUS), and South Korea’s Dankook University. A joint technical paper on scaling 2D semiconductor nanoribbons is expected in January 2026. Stanford’s Dr. Philip Wong serves in an advisory capacity.
Why the timing makes sense
The $12 million raise is earmarked for continued advancement of Nexstrom’s equipment and materials platform. The company isn’t trying to build fabs. It’s building the equipment and developing the materials that fab operators would eventually use.
