Seetrum has completed tens of millions of yuan in angel round financing with Oriza Seed as the lead-investor, and SEE Fund, Zhen Fund and Taiyou Fund as co-investors. This round of financing funds will be mainly used for the industrial landing and application and development of snapshot CMOS hyperspectral imaging chips.
SEETRUM is committed to leading global spectrum chips and making spectrum perception ubiquitous. Led by a distinguished professor from Changjiang Scholars Program, SEETRUM has innovatively developed a snapshot-type CMOS hyperspectral imaging chip. This chip enjoys the advantages of high precision, low cost, and mass production and saying goodbye to large-scale and expensive existing spectral detection equipment that only supports scanning imaging. It is no doubt that the new chip will charter a new course for industries like consumer electronics, medical diagnosis, machine vision, and environmental monitoring.
SEETRUM is developed from the Micro-Nano Optoelectronics Laboratory of Tsinghua University. The CMOS spectral imaging chip technology developed by the laboratory team opened up a new dimension of information acquisition --"real-time spectral imaging" for intelligent perception. In 2020, SEETRUM was established as a startup company that transformed the achievements of this project. Currently, SEETRUM has established R&D centers and marketing centers in Beijing, Shanghai and Suzhou.
About Investors
Oriza Seed favors early-stage, technology-oriented and promise-keeping companies in investment and enjoys a good reputation among technology-based start-ups. Up to now, Oriza Seed has invested and managed more than 180 high-quality companies, including Jiangsu Beiren (BR-Tech), Tianzhun Technology(TZTEK), Cambrian, Cloudwalk, Biocytogen, Be Creative Lab, Singleron Bio, Spideradio, Mogulinker, Ascentage Pharma, CStone Pharmaceuticals, JW Therapeutics.
Fei Jianjiang, the managing partner of Oriza Seed, said: "It is a revolutionary product! The spectral imaging chip is perfectly compatible with CMOS technology, and the spectral resolution has reached the sub-nanometer level, making it possible to seamlessly integrate spectral applications with life. This is due to over-ten-year academic accumulation and technological precipitation from the team of Professor Huang Yidong of Tsinghua University. Oriza Seed is committed to the incubation and investment of China's hard technology. We believe that this is a revolutionary technology that can form a new ecology for downstream industries, reshape application scenarios, and bring hopes to investor."
SEE Fund is an early-stage fund originating from Tsinghua and focuses on hard technology investment. Its LP cover top domestic investment institutions and industry leaders. SEE Fund values cutting-edge technology-based enterprises established by professors and alumni of Tsinghua University and other top universities. SEE Fund investment team, with successful entrepreneurial experiences, aims to use market-oriented mechanism to promote technological innovation and entrepreneurship, and empower early-stage technological projects and entrepreneurs.
SEE Fund believes: "Spectral imaging chip, with huge market opportunities, will create new application scenarios. Spectrum provides a new evaluation dimension and market opportunity for the use of multi-spectral camera in the mobile phone industry chain and for the application of substance identification and detection in food safety and health management industry. SEETRUM’s technologies are originated from the Micro-Nano Optoelectronics Laboratory of the Institute of Optoelectronics and Information of Tsinghua University. With an excellent R&D team led by Changjiang Scholars, SEETRUM independently researches and develops spectral imaging devices and chips with performance benchmarking to the top international standards, which have obvious first-mover technological advantages. SEETRUM’s CMOS technic enjoys the feature of mass production, much lower cost compared with the existing solution, high spectral resolution, small size, low power consumption, and it supports fast spectral imaging. SEETRUM's professional management team have much experience in industrialization, and can quickly implement product landing in multiple application scenarios and quickly iterate to build industry barriers.
Zhen Fund is an early-stage investment institution founded by Xu Xiaoping and Wang Qiang in 2011 in conjunction with Sequoia Capital China Fund, with The total scale of accumulated funds under management exceeds US$1 billion. Since its establishment, Zhen Fund has been actively looking for the best entrepreneurial teams and investment opportunities in the Internet, mobile Internet, future technology, artificial intelligence, corporate services, healthcare, big consumption, education and other fields. Zhen Fund has successively invested in more than 700 startup companies, and helped companies including Meicai, VIPKID, Xiaohongshu, Nuro, Yitu Tech, Hero Entertainment, Horizon Robotics, Prosperity Optimal, Waterdrop Mutual Assistance, Zhaogang.com, Logic Show., Momenta, Mia.com, Mobvoi, grow into unicorn companies. Since 2011, the companies invested by Zhen Fund such as Jiayuan.com, Jumei.com, LightInTheBox, 51Talk, Niu Technologies, Tiger Securities, Ehang, Yatsenglobal.com, Ucommune, have been listed successively, and more than 50 projects realized exit through various methods and obtained returns on investment. Since Zero2IPO established the ranking of early-stage investment institutions in “China Equity Investment Annual Ranking” in 2014, Zhen Fund has been ranked No. 1 in the “Top 30 Early Investment Institutions in China” for 6 consecutive years; Xu Xiaoping, founder of Zhen Fund, has been selected for four consecutive years on Forbes's “the Midas List” since 2016, and ranked 11th in 2019.
Taiyou Fund was jointly initiated and established by a management team led by Tsinghua Department and a group of outstanding entrepreneurs. Taiyou Fund owns the Taiyou Funds in China and sets up parallel funds overseas. Supported by alumni from Tsinghua University, MIT, Harvard and other universities, Taiyou Fund looks for high-tech entrepreneurial projects with investment potential, and grows together with entrepreneurs after investments. A number of high-growth technology projects invested by Taiyou Fund have become leaders in their field.
Yu Binyan, founding partner of Taiyou Fund, said: “With the extensive construction of next-generation 5G network and the continuous development of micro-nano optoelectronics and semiconductor technologies, distributed and miniaturized spectral sensors will be widely used in consumer electronics, industrial testing, and remote sensing mapping and medical diagnosis. Unlike the bulky and expensive traditional spectral detection equipment that is slow in imaging, the snapshot CMOS hyperspectral imaging chip developed by SEETRUM integrates thousands of hyperspectral pixels, which be compared to commercial spectrometers in performance. At the same time, it is obviously superior in size and price, and its comprehensive indicators are significantly better than the latest scientific research results.
