SK Square said on the 23rd that it made an investment in the U.S. company Hammerspace, which has a solution to resolve the AI-era "data bottleneck," through its overseas investment entity TGC Square. With this, SK Square has invested a cumulative total of about 30 billion won in seven AI and semiconductor technology corporations in the United States and Japan. The company noted it plans to invest a total of 100 billion won in promising corporations in the related fields going forward.
Hammerspace, which SK Square invested in this time, is an automated data orchestration platform company based in California. Data orchestration is a technology that logically combines data scattered across diverse systems worldwide so they can be run in an integrated way as if in a single local environment. It manages data flows by finding optimal data transfer paths, directing the flow of data as a conductor orchestrates an orchestra. It is regarded as a technology needed to maximize semiconductor performance in the AI era.
With the recent advancement of AI infrastructure, solving data bottlenecks and fragmentation has emerged as a task. In data centers, there are compute servers (GPU, CPU) that handle computation and storage servers that store data, and actual computation occurs only when the compute server issues commands and retrieves data stored on the storage server through the data network (path).
The problem is that bottlenecks occur in the process of retrieving scattered data. SK Square said Hammerspace is assessed to have the technology to address this point. Based on this, it has secured major clients such as Meta and Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States.
Hammerspace founder David Flynn, CEO, is recognized as the world's first creator of PCIe-based flash SSDs (high-speed storage) and is regarded as a "guru" in the memory industry. PCIe (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express) is a high-speed standard interface that connects the CPU, GPU, SSD, and more, and is the predecessor of Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe). In the past, CEO Flynn founded the NAND flash company Fusion IO and sold it to SanDisk for $1.1 billion (about 1.6 trillion won).
SK Square is discovering high-growth global corporations and investing at early stages. Based on this, it is expected to secure follow-on investment opportunities and earn additional investment revenue within a few years through initial public offerings (IPO).
U.S. corporation d-Matrix, invested in during the second half of 2023, raised a Series C round late last year, increasing its corporate value by more than $2 billion (about 3 trillion won). That is more than seven times its value at the time of investment. With major shareholders including Microsoft and Singapore sovereign wealth fund Temasek, d-Matrix is leading the "AI inference chip for data centers" market.
U.S. corporation TetraMem, which makes next-generation AI chips, is also expected to roughly double its corporate value from the existing $450 million (about 650 billion won) in a new funding round scheduled for this year. As demand grows for edge AI such as AR (Augmented Reality), VR (Virtual Reality (VR)), and smart cameras, TetraMem's high-speed, low-power AI is cementing its position in the market.
U.S. corporation Numat Technologies, invested in last year, is the only one in the world to have succeeded in mass production and commercialization by applying Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOF) to areas such as semiconductors and defense. In particular, as MOF scholars were selected for the Nobel Prize in chemistry last year, MOF is rapidly emerging in the materials market.
Other Japanese corporations invested in, Kyulux and AIOCORE, have also seen their corporate values rise through additional funding rounds after SK Square's investment. Kyulux, which holds next-generation OLED (organic light-emitting diode) patents, is recently pushing to supply products to major display corporations at home and abroad. As the "semiconductor-display integrated system-on-chip (SoC)" market expands, the importance of OLED display technology is gradually growing. AIOCORE is also supplying prototypes to potential clients in autonomous driving, medical devices, and aerospace. AIOCORE is an innovative corporation developing an "optical communication module" that replaces existing semiconductor copper wiring with a photon (photon, laser) interconnection method.
Another Japanese corporation invested in, LINK-US, is conducting technology verification with multiple major domestic secondary battery manufacturers and is also collaborating with major manufacturers in Japan and China. LINK-US leads in "ultrasonic composite vibration bonding equipment," which enables higher-strength, lower-damage bonding compared with existing techniques in metal joining, and is drawing attention as an innovative corporation in high-performance AI Semiconductor packaging.
Recently, TGC Square hired Ahn Hong-ik as chief investment officer (CIO), who has experience overseeing overseas investment operations at a global asset management firm. In addition, SK Square's main entity changed its existing CIO/portfolio management organization to the Strategic Investment Center to strengthen execution in global investment.
This year as well, SK Square plans to seek investments focused on AI infrastructure that alleviates AI bottlenecks and on the semiconductor value chain with promising future growth. SK Square President Kim Jeong-gyu said, "As part of securing preemptive market intelligence, we will continue to discover promising global AI and semiconductor technology corporations and keep investing through TGC Square."