All Funding Startup News in Korea (Korean Startup News)

FADU, a fabless startup, raises 12 billion won in pre-IPO funding… becomes a unicorn with an enterprise value of 1.8 trillion won

2023-02-27 2 min read

FADU, a fabless startup, raises 12 billion won in pre-IPO funding… becomes a unicorn with an enterprise value of 1.8 trillion won

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South Korea-based semiconductor fabless startup FADU announced today that it has completed its pre-IPO funding, becoming a unicorn with an enterprise value of KRW 1.8 trillion. 

This funding included existing investor Forest Partners and new investor IBK Capital, and was finalized at KRW 12 billion, 20% more than the initially planned amount due to the high demand for investment.

“The fact that we are the only Korean fabless company designing semiconductors with clear business performance in the global market despite the recent difficult capital market environment, especially in startup funding, seems to have been highly appreciated,” said PADU.

Padu has developed its flagship product, an SSD controller for data centers, and a family of SSDs equipped with it, and has secured a number of customers mainly in data centers and major big tech companies in the United States. Last year, when mass production sales were in full swing, sales reached the mid-50 billion won range, a significant increase from 5.1 billion won in 2021, and operating profit reached 4 billion won, turning the company into the black. We expect sales and profits to be realized in earnest from this year, and we are accelerating our growth by rapidly expanding our staff from 170 employees in July last year to more than 230 employees as of February this year.

Early last year, PADU selected NH Investment & Securities as the lead listing agent and Korea Investment & Securities as a co-manager, and also conducted a technical evaluation for a special listing, receiving AA and A ratings in the second half of last year.

Founded in July 2015, PADU, a fabless startup, is a system semiconductor company specializing in data centers, and its first product line and current main business is the solid state drive (SSD) business for data centers. PADU’s products have attracted great attention from the world’s leading hyperscale data centers, as they have the world’s highest performance in terms of read/write performance, as well as low power and low heat, which have become the most important topics in recent years.

In addition, Padu is leveraging its strong relationships with US Big Tech customers to expand into other semiconductor families that address key workloads in the data center, such as AI and Streaming. It has a sector development organization and is investing in and co-developing projects with North American network semiconductor companies. Based on this, we plan to grow into a global fabless company with sales of KRW 3 trillion by 2030 with a wide range of semiconductor products for data centers.

[Startup News in Korea]


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