London, 6 December 2023 – M&G Investments today has co-led a series D funding round alongside the UK Infrastructure Bank with a £40 million investment into Pragmatic – a world leader in semiconductor innovation. Founded in 2010 and headquartered in Cambridgeshire, Pragmatic is delivering a new generation of electronics to address real world issues.
Pragmatic has revolutionised and fully automated the semiconductor manufacturing process and by replacing silicon can create high quality, ultra-low cost chips with flexible form factor at faster production times. They are also suitable for Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) where unique IDs can be assigned to items of clothing and other products enabling efficient inventory keeping, checkout, customer interaction, and end of life tracking. This technology can also be extended to plastic bottles so they can be identified, sorted, and re-used, reducing volumes of landfill.
The £40 million investment has been made by M&G’s Catalyst strategy, which is investing up to £5 billion into innovative privately-owned global businesses working to create a more sustainable world. It follows previous investments in Vaccitech and Oxford Nanopore Technologies.
M&G’s funding will support business growth in the North of England and enable Pragmatic to scale its County Durham-based facility and build its third and fourth production lines, which will each produce billions of chips destined for fast-growing applications across multiple sectors. Over the next 10 years, Pragmatic is aiming for at least eight manufacturing lines in the UK, creating more than 500 highly skilled jobs in the North East and Cambridge.
Commenting on the investment, Global Head of Investments, M&G Catalyst, Niranjan Sirdeshpande, says: “The UK is blessed with a rich seam of enterprising and disruptive tech firms, but significant amounts of patient capital are needed to help companies like Pragmatic to expand and hone their operations - this is where Private Markets can help. We developed Catalyst to play a leading role in helping businesses to scale their operations, provide expertise and partner with them all the way to success. Long term capital put to work in this way not only supports economic growth but can capture value for people's pensions as we transition to a more sustainable economy. Pragmatic’s technology provides a compelling alternative for many mainstream electronics applications, as well as enabling new applications, which aren’t possible or are too expensive with silicon.”
“This successful Series D round is a clear testament to the massive opportunity for our innovative technology to enable item-level intelligence in virtually any object on the planet, adds David Moore, Pragmatic’s CEO.
“Our global customers value our ultra-thin and flexible form factor, our breakthrough low cost of customisation and rapid production cycles - and the lower environmental footprint compared to silicon. Thanks to this investment, we can scale our manufacturing capacity on the UK's first ever 300mm wafer production lines at our Durham site and deliver hundreds of billions of chips to customers worldwide over the coming decade.”
John Flint, CEO of UK Infrastructure Bank, concludes: “The Bank has an important role to play in unlocking finance to scale up domestic supply chains, like semiconductors, which are critical to the UK’s transition to net zero.
“Our investment in Pragmatic backs a British business to accelerate development of a first-of-a-kind technology which not only cuts the carbon emissions of semiconductor production, but which will drive growth in the local economy in the North-East.”