A WORLD-LEADING tech firm with a huge site in County Durham has secured more than $125m to accelerate its growth plans.

Pragmatic Semiconductor, which makes flexible electronics, has announced $35m additional investment, bringing the total raised in its Series C round to $125m, oversubscribing the original target by more than 50 per cent.

Investors have been attracted by the potential for Pragmatic’s unique, flexible integrated circuits to replace mainstream silicon chips, as well as to enable trillions of smart items in applications that would never be possible with silicon.

The extra funding will be used to accelerate and expand Pragmatic’s growth plans. This includes the company’s second fabrication line (FlexLogic-002), which will increase production capacity by more than five times, and its new 15-acre Pragmatic Park site at NETPark near Sedgefield. In addition, the company has doubled its footprint in Cambridge with an option to double again within the next year.

Scott White, chief executive officer of Pragmatic said, “This oversubscribed investment round, in spite of the challenging macroeconomic conditions, is a huge vote of confidence in Pragmatic’s unique technology and business traction.

“Our signature ultra low cost, flexible form factor, fast production cycle time and minimal carbon footprint address key challenges across the industry, allowing rapid time-to-market for novel electronics applications as well as enabling localisation of semiconductor manufacturing and driving towards net-zero product lifecycles.”

Erik Langaker, chairman of Pragmatic added: “We continue to see growing investor and customer interest in affordable solutions for digitisation and control of supply chains, reinforced by government initiatives such as the recent EU legislation regarding Digital Product Passports.

“This is the beginning of electronics in everything – supported by great technology developed and scaled in the UK.”

Additional new investors include Prosperity7 Ventures (the diversified growth fund under Aramco Ventures), the North East Development Capital Fund and the Finance Durham Fund (both managed by Maven Capital Partners).