AI memory chip startup Xcena has raised $135 million in a Series B funding round, valuing the company at $570m.

The round was co-led by Altinum and IMM Investment, with participation from Corstone Asia, SBI Investment, and Mirae Asset. It brings the total raised by the South Korean startup to $185m.

Founded in 2022 as MetisX by Samsung and SK Hynix veterans Jin Kim, Dohun Kim, and Harry Juhyun Kim, the startup rebranded to Xcena in 2024. The company’s MX1 chip connects to the CPU via Compute Express Link (CXL), allowing data to be processed before it leaves the memory module, helping to eliminate memory bottlenecks.

In a statement, Xcena said the funding will be used to scale up customer deployment, deepen collaboration with enterprise partners, and accelerate the development of its next-generation memory products.

“AI workloads are exposing the fundamental limitations of traditional computing architectures as larger models, expanding context windows, and increasingly data-intensive inference workloads drive unprecedented memory demands,” said Jin Kim, CEO and co-founder of Xcena. “With strong backing from leading global investors, we are accelerating delivery of MX1 into emerging AI infrastructure ecosystems and advancing the next wave of memory-centric computing systems.”

According to a report from TechCrunch, the chips will be manufactured by Samsung, with mass production slated for the end of 2026, and the company expecting to see revenue from its hardware in 2027.