Hangzhou-based Nano-core Chip has closed more than RMB 1 billion in a Series C2 round announced October 28, its second nine-figure raise in two months, as Chinese investors keep funding homegrown alternatives to imported AI accelerators.
JianTou Investment took the lead on the round, according to the announcement, and Hangzhou Capital and Kaitai Capital numbered among the other participants. Management intends to put the money toward product development and gearing up for volume production.
A 2021 spinoff from a Peking University research institute in Zhejiang, the company designs inference silicon that blends RISC-V cores with in-memory and three-dimensional near-memory computing. Keeping data next to the arithmetic units is meant to trim the memory traffic that dominates power draw during inference, and the lineup serves endpoints as well as cloud systems.
Per the company, three chips are through tape-out, and sampling for customers plus the first production shipments are slated for early 2027. That milestone is the one that counts, since tape-out announcements in China’s chip sector have often run ahead of production yields.
The round follows a RMB 1 billion Series C1 disclosed in September, leaving an unusually deep war chest for a first-generation inference merchant. Its backers are largely state-linked or based in Hangzhou, a pattern that has become standard for domestic AI silicon as export controls push buyers toward local suppliers.
Competition is sharpening. Chinese cloud operators and model developers have increasingly funded their own chip programs, and larger inference specialists have raised at far bigger marks. Nano-core’s wager is that a specialized memory architecture can win a slice of that demand.
Whether the two rounds together buy enough runway to reach early 2027 shipments is the open question for the company’s backers.
