We are a fabless semiconductor company raising another financing. We've already done a Series A with tier-1 VCs. Initial revenue won't be coming until early next year so not a true Series B in that regard. Any suggestions?
回答
Good luck with that. VCs have been moving away from semiconductor investments for the last couple of years. They require too much money and take too much time --- why invest $60-100M in a semi company when you can invest $10M each in 6-10 Web 2.0 companies? You need to probably go with a big guy with a large fund to lead or you will regret it --- I know this from personal lumps. Try Polaris, Morganthaler, Sequoia, Granite, etc. 2nd tier VCs will likely not have the pockets to properly fund the venture and you will end up getting squeezed. Get one early in their fund, not half way through it or you will get pushed too hard for liquidity event as their fund winds down. You want to get into a fund with at least a 10 year life and get in within the first year or two of the fund. You need a lead VC that can allocate about $30M to your deal over 5 rounds or so, if you can't find a lead like that you will likely regret it. Such a lead will successfully syndicate the rest of the investors. You should probably look for an acquisition exit by a larger company like Broadcomm, TI or Intel instead of going public, hopefully your technology is a core technology that can be implemented into one of these companies existing platforms. If you can't make that technical direction clear to investors you will likely find it very difficult to raise VC funding. You might consider competing for some DoD contracts to help build value. Hope this helps.
