GreatAsic Raises US$6.9M to Bring Custom AI Chip Design to Southeast Asia

The Pre-Series A, led by Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India, backs a team moving from assembling the world's chips to designing them.

For half a century, Southeast Asia has occupied a well-defined place in the semiconductor industry. The region assembles, packages and tests the chips that the rest of the world designs. It is reliable, high-volume work, and it sits some distance from where the real value in a chip is created.

That value lives at the front end, in the architecture and logic design that determine what a chip can do. It is harder, slower and far more lucrative, and it has long belonged to a small group of established players in a handful of countries. Breaking in requires rare engineering depth, expensive foundational technology, and the credibility to be taken seriously by an ecosystem that does not open its doors easily.

GreatAsic Technology is setting out to do exactly that. The company designs custom chips, silicon built for one specific purpose rather than the general-purpose processors sold off the shelf, with a focus on the specialised chips that run artificial intelligence across data centres, vehicles and edge devices. It is a fabless business, concentrating on the design itself while manufacturing is handled by dedicated foundries.

"Malaysia has world-class engineering talent and a once-in-a-generation opportunity to design, not just build, the chips that power the AI era," said Ong Chin Hu, Founder and CEO of GreatAsic. "This funding lets us hire engineers, expand operations and accelerate our planned ASIC projects, and build a Malaysian semiconductor design ecosystem that endures."

The timing is deliberate. Demand for custom AI silicon is climbing across every market GreatAsic serves, from the data centres training ever-larger models to the vehicles processing sensor data for driver-assistance and autonomous driving in real time. As that demand grows, design-led companies in markets with genuine engineering talent have an opening that did not exist a decade ago. The question is which teams are equipped to seize it.

GreatAsic's answer rests on its people. Its founding team brings decades of silicon experience across Altera, Broadcom, Intel, Marvell and StarFive, with a record of taking complex designs all the way through to high-volume production. That pedigree has already earned the company something rare for a young design firm: access to Arm's foundational technology, granted selectively and usually reserved for established names, positioning GreatAsic among the first design firms in its region to build on that industry-standard base.

Vertex's perspective

Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India led GreatAsic's US$6.9 million Pre-Series A round. The investment will fund engineering hires, expand operations and accelerate development of the company's planned silicon projects.

"We have known this team for several years, and on the strength of their track record in past roles at companies such as StarFive, Intel, Marvell and Broadcom, we believe they are the best positioned in Malaysia to design and deliver an AI SoC," said Chan Yip Pang, Executive Director, Investment, Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India. "For decades the country has assembled and tested the world's semiconductors; designing them is a far harder and more valuable undertaking, and few teams in the region are equipped to take it on."

The move up the value chain from assembly to design is one of the defining industrial shifts underway in the region. It will not happen through policy alone; it needs companies capable of turning ambition into working silicon that ships at scale. GreatAsic is one of the teams with the experience to do it, and we are proud to back them as they build.