Finalists for SEMI Startups for Sustainable Semiconductors to Present Live Pitches at SEMICON West 2026

The SEMI Startups for Sustainable Semiconductors (S3) program has announced 12 startups chosen as finalists for pitching to the industry at SEMICON West 2026 in San Francisco, California. The finalists were chosen from a field of 33 semifinalists after a virtual pitch event held over two days on July 29 and 30. Startups were evaluated by the organizing committee on five factors: the sustainability impact on our industry, commercial viability of product, company value proposition, the quality of the pitch and the startup team.

The committee, made up of experienced Corporate Venture Capitalists (CVCs) from the global semiconductor industry and chaired by Micron, received submissions across four categories identified for 2026:

Decarbonized Semiconductor Manufacturing
Design for Sustainability – Chips & Packaging
Datacenter Efficiency in Power Delivery and Thermals
New Frontiers in Sustainable Computing

Now in its fifth year, the program is built around two strengths: exposure to semiconductor industry CVCs and the personal mentoring each startup receives. Mentoring topics are tailored to align with the greatest need of the startup and can range from a basic introduction to semiconductor manufacturing to connections with new funding sources. A full analysis of the program is available here.

This year’s cohort spans six countries across four continents. The 12 finalists bring solutions across abatement, thermal management, water reuse, wafer inspection, power delivery, simulation, advanced packaging and memory architecture.

The SEMI Startups for Sustainable Semiconductors pitch event will take place on the Sustainability Pavilion Stage on Wednesday, October 14, starting at 1:00 p.m. Andrew Byrnes, Director of Venture Capital for Artificial Intelligence at Micron Technology and chair of the S3 steering committee, will open the session and introduce the startup pitches.

The finalist pitches will run through the afternoon, with each presenter given a 10-minute slot. Halfway through the pitch order, I will host a fireside chat with Steven Bakota, Corporate Vice President, Corporate Strategy and Corporate Development at Micron. The conversation will cover the role of startups in semiconductor sustainability and how they can build strong partnerships with large fabs.

After the second group of pitches, votes for the winning startups will be tabulated during the S3 alumni panel, where past participants will inspire this year’s finalists with their stories of building partnerships in the semiconductor industry. An awards ceremony at 4:05 p.m., sponsored by Pangaea Ventures, will wrap up the S3 event and kick off the Sustainability Reception.

Investors are welcome to attend the session at SEMICON West and to register their interest here to learn more about the 2027 program.

2026 S3 Finalists

Listed in presentation order.

Rise Technology srl Milano, Lombardy, Italy	Rise Technology develops next-generation semiconductor equipment based on its proprietary Dynamic Drop™ technology, overcoming the limits of conventional electroplating. The platform enables high-uniformity, high-throughput formation of interconnects, improving yield and enabling advanced architectures in heterogeneous integration, including chiplets, DRAM stacking, and 2.5D/3D packaging.

KoolMicro, Inc. Dongtan, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea	KoolMicro is engineering the “Thermal Highway” for the AI era. The company develops Integrated Manifold MicroChannel (IMMC) modules that handle 4,000W and higher thermal loads. Its Direct-to-Chip solution uses vertically sprayed coolant to remove heat directly from the chip level, ensuring next-generation GPUs and CPUs never throttle.

VEIR, Inc. Woburn, MA, USA	VEIR develops superconducting power solutions, including cables and supporting infrastructure, from grid to rack.

IWI Australia Pty Limited Sydney, NSW, Australia	IWI Australia has developed and piloted a patent-pending catalytic quench of hydrogen peroxide in fab wastewater, particularly in complex water matrices with high peroxide load, extreme acidity and heavy metals. The company has also developed a patent-pending oxidation process for triazole, another pain point in fab operation and water reuse.

enaDyne Leipzig, Saxony, Germany	enaDyne builds a fully electric, modular abatement system for semiconductor fabs based on non-thermal plasma catalysis. Its reactor destroys PFCs, VOCs, and NOx at greater than 99% destruction and removal efficiency through electron-impact chemistry at near-ambient temperature, fitting the same footprint as burn-wet for direct drop-in replacement. The same hardware extends to electrified chemical synthesis.

Powerlattice Technologies Inc. Phoenix, AZ, USA	Powerlattice has developed the first true monolithic integrated voltage regulator designed for high-wattage ASICs and XPUs operating above 1kW.

UNISERS Zurich, Canton of Zürich, Switzerland	UNISERS has developed a novel wafer defect inspection and characterization technology to help fabs find and identify minute contaminants below 10nm, which are mostly invisible to currently used inspection equipment. As transistor nodes move to 3nm and below, these very small particles cause significant yield issues in state-of-the-art wafer fabs.

CHIPADD, Corp. Binghamton, NY, USA	CHIPADD is the first to additively manufacture ultra-efficient copper cooling features directly onto the surface of GPU, CPU, and other high-power silicon chips. The company’s innovation includes materials and methods for robust bonding, manufacturing of solid and porous cooling features, enhanced materials for cooling, and manifold and precision jet design.

Flexcompute Boston, MA, USA	Flexcompute builds a GPU-native physics simulation platform: Tidy3D for photonic and electromagnetic FDTD, PhotonForge for photonic design automation, Flexcompute RF for full-wave electromagnetics, and Flow360 for computational fluid dynamics and thermal analysis, delivering results 50 to 500 times faster than legacy CPU tools. FlexAgent, the company’s AI assistant, enables engineers to run and iterate simulations via natural language, accelerating chip and data center component design.

HEXAspec Inc. Houston, TX, USA	HEXAspec develops advanced molding compounds for semiconductor encapsulation using high-aspect-ratio hexagonal boron nitride nanosheets in polymers. Its scalable, patent-protected exfoliation process enables ten times higher thermal conductivity while maintaining electrical insulation, mechanical strength, and compatibility with standard OSAT and foundry packaging for HPC, automotive, and edge-AI applications.

K1 Semiconductor Chicago, IL, USA	K1 Semiconductor creates engineered semiconductor wafers by peeling thin layers from high-quality single-crystal parent wafers. Its patented wafer splitting method releases a 5 to 50 micron-thick layer of single-crystal material from the parent wafer, which is then transferred and bonded to a handle wafer to create a custom semiconductor wafer.

FS2 Saint Louis, MO, USA	FS2 is developing a monolithic 3D integration platform and memory, building next-generation stacked 3D SRAM and Process-on-Memory architectures. Its product delivers memory solutions with bandwidth, capacity, low latency, energy efficiency and cost advantages for AI workloads.