XCENA, a chip startup with offices in South Korea and the US, has raised $135 million in a Series B at a $570 million valuation, led by Seoul-based firms Atinum and IMM Investment, to commercialise a chip that processes AI data directly within memory rather than routing it through expensive CPUs and GPUs.
Founded in 2022 by CEO Jin Kim, CTO Dohun Kim, and CPO Harry Juhyun Kim — all veterans of Samsung and SK Hynix — the company argues that AI inference is increasingly a memory scaling problem, not just a compute one. Its MX1 chip connects to processors via CXL, handling preprocessing, KV cache management, and data orchestration inside the memory module itself. The company claims this could reduce server requirements tenfold.
Mass production is scheduled via Samsung’s foundry by end of 2026, with revenue expected from 2027.
Featured image: Credit: XCENA
