Qianhe Yibang closes a 2 billion yuan B round for 3D compute-in-memory chips

Qianhe Yibang, a leader in 3D compute-in-memory chips, recently closed a B round above 2 billion yuan. As China accelerates high-quality integrated-circuit development and Indigenous breakthroughs in core technologies, innovative firms with self-developed ability and new chip architectures are becoming central to industrial upgrading. Globally, the digital economy has entered a compute-centric phase, and memory faces rising bandwidth, lower latency and larger capacity demands. Three-dimensional integration breaks traditional chip limits to fuse compute and storage, a key direction for next-generation semiconductors.

Qianhe Yibang 3D compute-in-memory chip architecture diagram
Qianhe Yibang builds 3D DRAM compute-in-memory chips aimed at the memory-wall bottleneck. (Source: LeiPhone)

Founded in January 2024 and incubated by NetEase, Qianhe Yibang was among the first Chinese chip firms focused on 3D compute-in-memory, three-dimensional native integration architecture and cloud-gaming acceleration. Its core team began exploring and mass-producing the world’s first 3D DRAM compute-in-memory architecture chip back in 2018, and pushed native 3D integration into encryption compute and application acceleration, making it a pioneer and leader in the field.

Qianhe Yibang team and wafer sample
The company combines system software and hardware architecture co-innovation from the base layer. (Source: LeiPhone)

The company promotes a new paradigm of native 3D integration and 3D compute-in-memory, jointly innovating system software and hardware architecture from the bottom up. By stacking 3D DRAM in three-dimensional space it deeply fuses compute and storage, pioneering a path around the growing memory-wall bottleneck and breaking the performance limit of separated storage and compute under the von Neumann architecture, a lane-change overtake into the integrated revolution of future 3D circuits.

Qianhe Yibang chip prototype on a board
Qianhe Yibang’s backers include national and industrial funds alongside NetEase and China Mobile. (Source: LeiPhone)

This round blends industrial and financial capital: the national-level Restructuring Fund, China Mobile’s Chain-Leader Fund, Shanhang Capital, Xinglian Capital, Shixi Capital, Jinpu Investment, Nanshan Capital, Hundun Investment, Chenyi Huizhi, Guocai Investment, Guoxin Venture and Gezhi Capital. Notably, long-term shareholders NetEase Youdao and China Mobile’s Chain-Leader Fund have supported the company since inception and built deep business synergy, giving the chips a ready demand entry and validation scene. The funds will expand R&D, product iteration and commercialisation of native 3D integration and 3D compute-in-memory.

Qianhe Yibang application acceleration demo
The architecture targets encryption compute and application acceleration use cases. (Source: LeiPhone)

Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original LeiPhone report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience.

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