Australian chip packaging startup Syenta has raised $26 million in a Series A funding round to improve chip-to-chip connectivity.

The round was led by Playground Global and Australia’s National Reconstruction Fund (NRF), with participation from existing investors Investible, Salus Ventures, Jelix Ventures, and Wollemi Capital.

The company also announced that former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, who is now a general partner at Playground Global, would be joining its board of directors.

In a statement, Syenta said that the funding will be used to further commercialize its technology and support its expansion into Arizona, USA, in preparation for high-volume production of its interconnect offering.

“This expansion will enable closer collaboration with customers and manufacturing partners while supporting the growth of the US semiconductor ecosystem and strengthening supply chain resilience,” the statement added.

Founded in 2022 and based on research undertaken at the Australian National University, Syenta is developing Localized Electrochemical Manufacturing (LEM) technology that aims to improve AI system performance and availability by enabling high-density, chip-to-chip connections.

The startup claims that its LEM technology makes advanced packaging more widely accessible, helping to reduce wafer supply chain constraints and decrease manufacturing process steps by around 40 percent with the need for a redesign of existing fabrication approaches.

“Today’s advanced packaging approaches have real limits on interconnect density, which constrain the bandwidth between chips,” said Dr. Jekaterina Viktorova, CEO and founder of Syenta. “We’re enabling finer-pitch connections within existing manufacturing infrastructure, allowing systems to move more data more efficiently and at a lower cost without requiring entirely new fabrication approaches.”

In a post on LinkedIn, Gelsinger wrote: “Advanced packaging is becoming a critical constraint in scaling next-generation systems. Great to see more attention on the innovation happening to address it. Excited about what’s ahead.”