Meridian innovation secures US$8 million in funding

Meridian Innovation Pte, the pioneer developer of low cost, mass producible thermal sensors, announced that it has secured a total of US$8 million in its latest round of financing inclusive of a bank loan. Existing investors: Creative Technology; Excelpoint’s investment arm, PlanetSpark; and SEEDS Capital; together with new investor, Best Ever Pte, a subsidiary of Best Ever Industries, will participate in this latest round, bringing Meridian Innovation’s total investment to date to more than US$18 million.

This round of investment will further accelerate Meridian’s ramp up in production of thermal sensors and development of the second generation of its SenXorTM thermal sensor solution, which is protected by a number of international patents. Over the last 12 months, Meridian has shipped to over 20 customers in multiple market segments, including IoT devices: Smart Appliances; ADAS; AI-assisted Heat Failure Analyzers and Security; Medical & Safety products; as well as portable thermography instruments. Meridian is uniquely positioned to address these emerging markets which are all rapidly adopting low-cost thermal sensors. Both investors and customers are embracing Meridian’s compelling, patented CMOS thermal sensors, due to their salient benefits of low-power and low-cost owing to their mass manufacturable CMOS process.

“Since we first invested in 2019, Excelpoint has been a strategic partner for Meridian’s thermal sensor and we have witnessed a rapid adoption of these sensors due to their competitive price points and performance. We continue to invest in Meridian as we see the tremendous potential for this kind of
sensors which are synergistic with Excelpoint’s focus segments and vast regional distribution network in the Asia Pacific Region,” stated Albert Phuay Yong Hen, Chairman and Group Chief Executive Officer of Excelpoint Technology.

“For the past year, we have been manufacturing Meridian’s thermal sensor modules and promoting them to our customer base. We are very enthusiastic in this new line of sensors and their market adoption. Best Ever has been a premier supplier of RGB and other sensors to Tier 1 customers around
the world. We want to play a larger role by investing in Meridian to accelerate the adoption across multiple market segments which can be transformative for many industries,” said Vincent Chiang, CTO of Best Ever Industries.

“Meridian is honored to have Best Ever joining Creative, Excelpoint and SEEDS Capital as investors. With Best Ever, a premier manufacturer investing in Meridian and partnering with us to ramp up production to meet the increasing demand, we are well positioned to have an explosive growth in the coming
years,” said Hock Leow, CEO and Co-Founder of Meridian Innovation. “We have been shipping for a full year to our customer base and seen a rapid adoption of our thermal sensor. We are committed to constant innovation and, with this new investment, we are accelerating our second-generation sensor
development. We will be sampling our second generation SenXor product in early 2022.” About Meridian Innovation

Meridian Innovation, headquartered in Singapore, is a pioneering developer of advanced Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (“CMOS”) Thermal Imaging solutions with operations also in Hong Kong, USA and UK. Meridian Innovation is committed to the development of cost effective and high-performance Thermal Imaging Sensor-based solutions for commercial and consumer applications that will enable safer and better living. Meridian’s technology utilizes a unique patented approach in fabricating MEMS LWIR sensors based on CMOS. Combining a proprietary wafer-level vacuum packaging allows Meridian to produce their sensors at lower cost and mass producible v