FusionAP raises US$2M to challenge the OSAT incumbents shaping the AI chip era

Advanced packaging is no longer a back-end commodity. It is where AI performance is now won or lost, and FusionAP is betting that the world's chipmakers need a new partner.

For decades, semiconductor performance was a story about transistors. Smaller, faster, denser. The companies that built better silicon won.

That story is changing.

As transistor scaling slows and AI workloads demand more compute than any single chip can deliver, the industry has turned to a different lever: stitching multiple chiplets together into a single high-performance package. This is advanced packaging, and it has quietly become the layer where the next decade of AI performance will be decided.

It is also one of the tightest bottlenecks in the global semiconductor supply chain. Today, advanced packaging capacity sits with a small group of OSAT (outsourced semiconductor assembly and test) incumbents, concentrated in just a few geographies. The world's leading chip designers are competing for the same scarce slots.

A new entrant, built by the people who built the incumbents

FusionAP is building an outsourced semiconductor assembly and test platform for advanced 2.5D, 3D and beyond packaging, working with global design houses, foundries and technology partners from prototype to high-volume production.

The team has been inside this problem for decades. Founder and CEO Teng Chow Ooi was the first employee of Intel's US$7 billion advanced packaging plant in Malaysia, scaling the organisation to hundreds of people. Co-founder Peter Chavart was previously General Manager of Intel's Disaggregation Manufacturing Organization.

"We formed FusionAP to solve the most pressing bottleneck in semiconductor scaling," said Teng Chow Ooi, Founder of FusionAP. "We are ready to move full-speed ahead to become a key OSAT player in advanced packaging."

The market is asking for a new supplier

The advanced packaging market is forecast to grow at double-digit rates through the decade, driven by AI accelerators, high-bandwidth memory, and the broader shift to chiplet-based architectures. Yet the supply side has barely budged. The handful of OSAT incumbents that dominate the category are stretched, and customers are increasingly looking for a credible second source, one that can match technical depth without inheriting the geographic concentration risk of the current market.

That is the gap FusionAP is built for.

Vertex's perspective

Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India co-led FusionAP's US$2 million pre-seed round alongside Southern Capital Group. The funding will go towards engineering and process integration, R&D, and pilot capacity, supported by a matching research grant from Malaysia's Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation.

"Advanced packaging is both the critical bottleneck and the critical enabler in next-generation semiconductor performance," said Chan Yip Pang, Executive Director, Investment at Vertex Ventures SEA and India. "Teng Chow and the team bring rare deep domain expertise to one of the most strategically important layers of the chip stack. We're excited to back FusionAP as they build a world-class advanced packaging platform out of Malaysia and position Southeast Asia as a key node in the global semiconductor supply chain."

The next layer of the stack

The semiconductor industry is reorganising around advanced packaging, and the companies that supply it will sit at the centre of the AI era. FusionAP is the bet that the next generation of OSAT leaders will not all come from the same three names that defined the last one.