Jamie GoldsteinAt Pillar VC, we are drawn to backing bold founders solving hard problems. Few challenges are as complex—or as critical—as those facing the semiconductor industry today.
Semiconductors are the lifeblood of modern technology, powering everything from smartphones and electric vehicles to advanced AI systems. The U.S. has long been a pacesetter in this space, but that is increasingly under pressure. As geopolitical tensions rise and global supply chains grow more complex, we can’t take U.S. leadership for granted.
FabuBlox is a groundbreaking collaboration network that promises to revolutionize how semiconductor designers, fabs, and equipment providers work together.
The Team
FabuBlox was founded by two recent MIT PhDs Jan Tiepelt and Josh Perozek and two experienced engineers Jack Muller and Eyal Perry. The vision for FabuBlox was born out of experiencing these problems in fabricating devices at MIT. Tenacious and focused, they built a first solution and shared it with the world and it has taken off. In just a few quarters, the company has thousands of users at over 70 fab facilities and over 20 companies.
FabuBlox: The Network for Semiconductor Design & Fabrication
At its core, FabuBlox addresses one of the biggest inefficiencies in semiconductor manufacturing – finding a fab who can make your specific device.
Why? Because finding a fab can require coordination between designers, fabs, equipment providers, and their materials suppliers. Creating a new chip involves 100s of highly specialized process steps with many 1000s of parameters, with designers needing to align their requirements with the capabilities of a fab—and the tools that fab owns. Today, much of this process happens through manual, ad hoc methods that are slow, error-prone, fragmented and expensive.
FabuBlox changes the game by offering a platform that acts as the connective tissue for the entire semiconductor ecosystem:
- Process Design Collaboration: Designers can use FabuBlox to plan their multi-step semiconductor manufacturing process, leveraging public and private “GitHub” repositories of process designs using open data standards. This dramatically reduces the time required to create and validate a manufacturing plan.
- Fab Capability Transparency: Fabs can share their capabilities (tools and process steps they support), making it easier for designers to find a compatible manufacturing partner.
- Acceleration: By closing the loop between designers, fabs, and equipment providers, FabuBlox streamlines the process to finalize an approved design and bring chips to market—saving both time and money.
- Visibility and Choice: designers will find more possible fabs to support their needs; fabs will find more prospective customers to fill their capacity.
Once we have a collaboration platform in place, many additional benefits will emerge – manufacturing could occur across multiple fabs in sequence or in parallel, fabs will decrease downtime and increase utilization, equipment providers will gain insights into their product roadmaps, materials suppliers will better manage inventories. The entire supply chain will benefit.
As the world becomes increasingly digital, the importance of semiconductors will only grow, and the complexity of designing and manufacturing these devices will continue to escalate. By building a network among customers, fabs and suppliers, FabuBlox is unlocking innovation and creating opportunities for the next generation of semiconductor founders.
Interested in working with them? Check out their open roles here: https://www.fabublox.com/careers