Hustler Words – Singaporean AI startup SixSense, spearheaded by a female founding team, has secured $8.5 million in Series A funding to revolutionize semiconductor manufacturing. This investment, led by Peak XV’s Surge, formerly Sequoia India & SEA, with participation from Alpha Intelligence Capital and FEBE, brings their total funding to approximately $12 million. The company is tackling the critical issue of real-time defect detection in chip production.
Founded in 2018 by CTO Akanksha Jagwani and CEO Avni Agarwal, SixSense is poised to transform how semiconductor factories leverage data. The company’s AI-powered platform analyzes raw production data, including defect images and equipment signals, to provide actionable insights that prevent quality issues and enhance production yield.
Agarwal, in an interview with Hustler Words – , highlighted the surprising lack of real-time intelligence in an industry known for its precision. Despite the massive amounts of data generated on factory floors, inspection processes remain largely manual and fragmented. This realization, stemming from conversations with over 50 engineers, fueled their mission to modernize quality control.
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The SixSense platform empowers process engineers by providing early warnings for potential problems, enabling defect detection, root cause analysis, and failure prediction. What sets SixSense apart is its accessibility: process engineers can fine-tune models with their own data and deploy them rapidly, without requiring any coding expertise.
While the competitive landscape includes internal engineering teams, inspection equipment manufacturers integrating AI, and other startups, SixSense is already making significant inroads. Major semiconductor manufacturers like GlobalFoundries and JCET are utilizing the platform, processing over 100 million chips to date. Customers report impressive results, including up to 30% faster production cycles, a 1-2% increase in yield, and a remarkable 90% reduction in manual inspection efforts.
Agarwal emphasized that their target customers are large-scale chipmakers, including foundries, outsourced semiconductor assembly and test providers (OSATs), and integrated device manufacturers (IDMs). With existing operations in Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Israel, SixSense is now expanding its reach into the U.S. market.
The company is strategically positioned to capitalize on the global reshaping of chip manufacturing driven by geopolitical tensions. As fabs and OSATs expand in regions like Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, India, and the U.S., SixSense’s AI-native approach offers a compelling advantage, particularly for new facilities unburdened by legacy systems.
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