Source: Entrepreneurship Bang

According to information obtained by StartupBang, Juxin Microelectronics, a provider of high-performance intelligent audio and optical solutions, recently completed a Series D financing round of hundreds of millions of yuan. This round was led by 5Y Capital, with ByteDance and Juhua Chuanxin participating, and existing shareholders such as Huaye Tiancheng and Source Code Capital also increasing their investments. The funds raised will be used to accelerate product iteration and commercialization across various product lines.

This round of financing comes just six months after the previous Series C strategic financing of several hundred million yuan. Juxin Microelectronics has now secured joint strategic investments from several leading smartphone and internet companies.

Juxin Microelectronics was founded in January 2016. The company's business mainly involves high-performance analog and mixed-signal chip technology and its applications. The company is headquartered in Wuhan and has established R&D and sales centers in Shenzhen, Shanghai, Europe and the Americas.

Currently, the company holds dozens of independent intellectual property rights. 3D vision and intelligent audio are the company's two main product lines, and the company owns dozens of independent intellectual property rights for these products.

In March of this year, the company released China's first back-illuminated, high-resolution ToF sensor chip with completely independent intellectual property rights, which is suitable for high-precision applications such as face recognition and 3D modeling.

With its superior performance and reliability, the intelligent audio function has been mass-produced by mainstream mobile phone manufacturers. Its audio solutions have served tens of millions of first-tier brand mobile phones and hundreds of millions of consumers worldwide.

The company's flagship intelligent audio chips and solutions have shipped hundreds of millions of units to leading mobile phone manufacturers such as OPPO, Xiaomi, and Samsung; its independently developed 5um VGA-level back-illuminated high-resolution ToF time-of-flight sensor chip has been successfully taped out and has completed technical evaluation and testing with several leading customers in the industry, and has received bulk orders; at the same time, linear motor drive chips and optical sensing chips are about to achieve mass production.

Despite its short history, Juxin Microelectronics boasts a highly capable team. Founded by several returnees with extensive experience in the semiconductor industry in Europe and America, the core team members have educational backgrounds from top universities and research institutes in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, and Switzerland, and have worked for many years in leading chip companies in Europe and America, possessing rich experience in mixed-signal chip development and mass production.

The R&D team has master's or doctoral degrees from well-known universities at home and abroad, and has rich technological innovation capabilities and more than ten years of industrialization experience in fields such as sensor chip design and sensor algorithm fusion.

Our marketing and sales team has long been rooted in the domestic smartphone and smart hardware industry chain, possessing abundant customer resources and market development experience.

Liu Deheng, founder and CEO of Juxin Microelectronics, said, "Juxin will further attract top talents in the industry, increase talent density, adhere to the development of multiple product lines, promote the research and development and commercialization of products in multiple sensing fields such as hearing, vision, and touch, provide differentiated value to customers, and contribute to the development of the industry."

Regarding future market plans, Kong Fanxiao, co-founder and chief marketing officer of Juxin Microelectronics, said that the company will focus on the field of 3D optics based on ToF technology, including high-resolution, high-precision iToF sensors for applications such as near-field 3D face recognition, 3D modeling, gesture recognition, and motion capture, as well as long-range, low-power dToF sensors for applications such as AR/MR (augmented reality/mixed reality), SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping), and even autonomous driving.

Liu Kai, a partner at 5Y Capital, stated, "Juxin Microelectronics is one of the few teams in China that possesses both top-tier R&D capabilities and successful mass production experience in the fields of intelligent audio and advanced optical sensing, achieving national leadership in multiple areas. We are very optimistic about the development of the company's next-generation 3D optical product line. With the maturation of AR/VR and smart car fields, we see a large number of optical application scenarios emerging. The next generation of hardware requires the support of the next generation of underlying supply chain technologies. This industry trend has already occurred many times in the fields of smartphones and new energy vehicles. We believe that the company has the opportunity to become a leader in the next generation of optical sensing."

Yang Huajun, founding partner of Huaye Tiancheng, said: "From the early focus on a single product line to today's simultaneous development of multiple product lines, as an early investor in Juxin, we have witnessed Juxin's robust growth. Whether it is the development of digital twins or metaverse, it requires the data support of basic sensors and actuators. We look forward to Juxin becoming an important sensor for intelligent products in various industries in the field of vision and hearing in the future."