On the eve of an explosive boom in the AI glasses market, the mass production and full-colorization of Micro-LED display technology remains one of the greatest challenges confronting the industry. It has been reported that “Qiushui Semiconductor,” the pioneer of the world’s first damage-free Micro-LED bonding technology route, has sequentially closed its Pre-A and Series A funding rounds, securing an aggregate total of nearly 200 million RMB.
This round of financing will be primarily funneled into building an 8-inch hybrid bonding mass production line in Ningbo. By completely abandoning traditional physical etching processes, Qiushui Semiconductor has addressed the luminescent material damage issue at its root, providing a revolutionary solution for the large-scale mass production and red-light efficiency breakthroughs of Micro-LEDs. Furthermore, Qiushui’s Micro-LED technology utilizes a hybrid-bonded vertical stacking architecture. It has successfully achieved hybrid bonding interconnection between optical chips and electrical chips within an ultra-fine pitch inside a 3.75-micron pixel. In the future, this hybrid bonding pitch can be further scaled down to 2 microns, aligning it with the exact same process node as the “Tau ($\tau$) Law” advanced hybrid bonding process recently unveiled by Huawei.
This funding round was led by Zhaohui Capital, with participation from Tongshang Fund, Shengyu Investment, Ningbo Talent Development Fund, Jiayi Venture Capital, Yongxian Technology, Digital Optical Chip, and Xingtang Capital. Xingtang Capital served as the long-term financial advisor.
01 Pioneering a Global Technology Route to Drive the AI Glasses “iPhone Moment”
In 2025, the AI glasses market experienced a massive boom. According to the latest data from Omdia, global shipments of AI glasses reached 8.7 million units in 2025, representing a staggering year-over-year surge of 322%. The market share of smart glasses that support display features leaped from 3.3% in 2024 to 8.4%. However, as the universally recognized ultimate next-generation display technology, Micro-LED has remained bottlenecked by mass production and full-colorization challenges.
In the digital automotive lighting sector, an analysis by TrendForce indicates that the market penetration rate for Adaptive Driving Beams (ADB) is projected to reach 21.6% by 2029. Automakers like Porsche have already begun adopting headlight solutions featuring Micro-LED pixel modules.
Yet, whether for AI glasses or digital automotive lighting, the mass production bottleneck at the chip level stands as the primary obstacle preventing these two major applications from taking off commercially.
Historically, the industry has universally relied on physical etching to divide Micro-LED pixels. This process is akin to using a coarse knife to cut incredibly microscopic luminescent crystals, which inevitably inflicts severe material damage along the cuts. This damage not only results in poor chip yields, increased electrical leakage, and excessively wide light-emission angles, but it also strips red-light chips of over 97% of their luminous efficiency. This has formed a seemingly insurmountable chasm for full-color displays and stands as the biggest hurdle restricting downstream commercial mass production.
Confronted with this industry pain point, Qiushui Semiconductor—founded in November 2022—devised a disruptive alternative. Moving away from traditional physical cutting, they engineered an innovative, proprietary chip architecture that establishes an “electrically insulated” invisible wall between pixels. This world-first damage-free architecture achieves electrical isolation for each individual pixel without disrupting the physical structure.
Because the luminescent material remains perfectly intact, its luminous efficiency is naturally preserved to the greatest extent possible. Combined with an 8-inch silicon substrate and a hybrid bonding 3D packaging process, Qiushui Semiconductor’s solution can elevate chip yields to over 6N (99.9999%). It narrows the light-emission angle from $\pm$60° to $\pm$10° and extends the operating temperature range from below 50°C to over 140°C. This signifies that the Micro-LED chip industry has entirely broken free from the shackles of material etching damage. Utilizing existing, mature AlInGaP red light materials, Qiushui can swiftly achieve the mass production of red-light Micro-LED chips. Reportedly, Qiushui has already fully integrated the red-light 8-inch hybrid bonding process, paving the way for mass production shipments of red-light Micro-LED chips within this year.
Furthermore, resolving the material etching damage enables Micro-LED chips to catch the express train of semiconductor Moore’s Law. This allows pixel sizes to rapidly shrink from the current mainstream of 4 microns down to 2 microns, and eventually into the sub-micron realm, meeting the demanding requirements of lightweight designs and high-definition displays for AI glasses. Notably, while pixel sizes below 2 microns have traditionally been a forbidden zone for the Micro-LED industry, they are not a forbidden zone for the broader semiconductor industry—and this damage-free structure completely shatters that boundary. At the same time, avoiding etching damage and leakage pathways ensures superior product stability for both automotive-grade and consumer electronics-grade applications.
02 Unit Costs Plummet Significantly; 8-Inch Production Line to Go Live This Year
No matter how outstanding a technology is, it must prove itself through mass production. At present, the industry is shifting toward 8-inch wafer-level hybrid bonding processes, yet companies that have truly integrated and cleared the mass production phase remain exceptionally rare. According to insights obtained by Hardkr (Yingke), Qiushui Semiconductor is the first startup in China to successfully run and complete an 8-inch hybrid bonding process line.
Looking at the competitive landscape within China, distinct development paths have emerged in the Micro-LED chip sector. Unlike some companies that opt for a heavy-asset IDM model—characterized by lengthy factory construction cycles and intense capital pressures—Qiushui Semiconductor has embraced a “Fab-lite” model. This means they focus their internal construction on critical, proprietary processes that lack mature foundry platforms—such as hybrid bonding—ensuring that core manufacturing steps remain under independent, proprietary control.
This model grants the company immense flexibility. It enables them to design tailored solutions to meet the personalized demands of diverse clients while rapidly scaling up volume. Currently, Qiushui Semiconductor is constructing an 8-inch hybrid bonding production line in the Ningbo High-Tech Zone, which is projected to be fully operational and connected by October of this year.
Dr. Zhenyu Jiang, founder of Qiushui Semiconductor, anticipates that within the coming year, shipments of AI glasses with display capabilities could surge from the current hundreds of thousands of units to the tens of millions. Once operational, the Ningbo production line will be capable of producing thousands of 8-inch wafers per month. This corresponds to a supply capacity of over 10 million Micro-LED chips annually, which is fully capable of backing the large-scale volume demands of top-tier terminal manufacturers.
In terms of product offerings, Qiushui Semiconductor previously introduced a 0.61-inch digital automotive lighting chip, which has already successfully completed customer sample verification. Concurrently, AR red, green, and blue monochromatic chips are scheduled for large-scale mass production and shipment this year. Dr. Jiang believes that monochromatic green chips are already capable of meeting the requirements of specific scenarios, such as conference teleprompters, real-time translation, in-car navigation, and swimming goggles. Furthermore, pairing the individual red, green, and blue monochromatic chips with a three-color optical engine will pave the way for true full-color scale applications.
As a panel expert for the Ministry of Science and Technology’s Major Special Projects on Novel Displays, Dr. Zhenyu Jiang graduated from Pennsylvania State University, where he focused on semiconductor optoelectronic materials and chip research. He brings 15 years of technology R&D and team management experience to the table, having previously served as Senior Scientist at Dalian Elec-Tech Photoelectric, R&D Director at Foshan NationStar Semiconductor, and R&D Director at the Shenzhen Institute of Third-Generation Semiconductors.
The co-founder possesses 8 years of entrepreneurial experience in high-power LED automotive lighting. Meanwhile, core team members have held key positions at institutions like Huawei HiSilicon, Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC), and Intel, bringing deep R&D experience in hybrid bonding and advanced packaging processes.
Qiushui Semiconductor is not merely engineering a chip; it is laying down the foundational infrastructure for the impending “iPhone moment” of AI glasses. By breaking through a series of core technical barriers, Qiushui Semiconductor is stepping forward as a pioneer to reshape the Micro-LED industrial landscape, contributing its uniquely tailored “Qiushui Solution” to fuel the prosperous growth of the micro-display industry!
Yue Zhang, Founding Partner of Zhaohui Capital, commented: “Qiushui Semiconductor moved away from traditional physical cutting, engineering an innovative, proprietary chip architecture that establishes an ‘electrically insulated’ invisible wall between pixels. This world-first damage-free architecture achieves electrical isolation for each individual pixel without disrupting the physical structure. This sort of disruptive innovation, which rewrites the underlying rules of the game, is precisely what is laying down the foundational infrastructure for the impending ‘iPhone moment’ of AI glasses.”
The project lead for the Tongshang Fund stated: “At present, with the accelerating proliferation of smart vehicles and AI-AR intelligent hardware, Micro-LED micro-displays have become a highly lucrative, booming track within the semiconductor display sector. Qiushui Semiconductor’s self-developed damage-free hybrid bonding process conquers the widespread industry challenges of etching damage and pixel control. It is highly anticipated to resolve the developmental bottleneck of full-color Micro-LED displays, boasting an exceptionally prominent technological barrier and business positioning advantage. The company’s core team has been deeply rooted in the semiconductor optical display industry for many years, blending process R&D, mass production deployment, and industrial resource integration capabilities with a clear strategy and robust execution. We are highly optimistic about Qiushui’s ability to leverage its first-mover technological advantage to capture industry dividends and drive the breakthrough and upgrading of the Micro-LED sector. We look forward to seeing the company grow into a globally competitive leader in micro-displays.”
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