Metassurface Photonic Chip Developer Shanhe Photonics Completes Pre-A Round of Financing

Shanhe Photonics, a developer of metasurface photonic chips, completed a Pre-A round of financing worth tens of millions of yuan on Monday. The deal was jointly led by Matrix Partners and Shunyu Industrial Fund, followed by Casstar. The fresh funds will be used for product research and development, team expansion and small-scale mass production.

In recent years, the research of metasurface and metalens has become a hot topic in optical frontier technology. Metasurfaces are artificial structural arrays made of a large number of subwavelength units designed and arranged in a two-dimensional plane, capable of flexible modulation of electromagnetic waves. Metalenses are lens-functional metasurfaces with a smaller size, lighter weight and easier integration, which enables the precise control of incident light amplitude, phase, polarization and other parameters. Metalenses have potentially important applications in mobile phone/vehicle camera modules, VR/AR, holographic display, medical sensing and imaging, and other sensitive-case uses.

Shanhe Photonics, established at the end of 2020, is dedicated to the development and manufacturing of metasurface photonic chip products in the direction of light super-sensing, light high-capacity transmission, micro-display, and optical computing.

Shanhe Photonics holds a number of innovative patents and related products that have broad market prospects in many fields such as consumer electronics, automotive electronics, unmanned aerial vehicles, security and surveillance, autonomous driving, communications, aerospace, and defense and military industries. Shanhe Photonics has now completed the sample production and module packaging for a variety of its metasurface photonic chip products and expects to achieve small-scale mass production later this year.

As for the technical team, Shanhe Photonics brings together many doctors from renowned universities and research institutes at home and abroad and many industry experts with more than 10 years of experience in semiconductor processing and wafer-level optical module packaging. The company has established partnerships with many universities and research institutes at home and abroad. The CEO of the company has himself been working in the field of optics and semiconductors for many years. He draws experience from his time at the IBM R&D Alliance, one of the two major semiconductor R&D centers in the world, where he worked for nearly ten years before returning to China.

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In terms of market prospects, Lux Research, a leading U.S. technology research organization, expects the future optical metasurface market to exceed $50 billion with the market set to explode as the frontier technology for metasurface photonic chips is moving toward implementation.