The successful closing of a £5m equity funding round, sw cybersecurity-focused venture capital firm eCAPITAL and Seraphim Capital, a specialist investor in the space ecosystem, join existing UltraSoC investors and business angel Guillaume d’Eyssautier.
UltraSoC will be recruiting hardware and software engineers at its headquarters in Cambridge, UK, and design centre in Bristol UK. It also plans to open an engineering centre in Warsaw, Poland to develop its data science and machine-learning technologies; it will also expand its network of customer support engineers globally, and increase its commercial presence in key markets, including Europe, the USA, Japan and China.
The latest funding round follows a period of growth for UltraSoC with a strong list of new customers and a number of important technology developments. Willi Mannheims, Managing Partner at eCAPITAL, and James Bruegger, Managing Partner and Investment Director, Seraphim Capital join the UltraSoC board as investor director and observer respectively.
UltraSoC Chairman, Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, commented: “Developers are struggling to cope with the need for trusted solutions for cybersecurity and functional safety. UltraSoC is uniquely able to provide such features at the fundamental hardware level. eCAPITAL and Seraphim add sector-specific focus and expertise in cybersecurity and in the aerospace ecosystem, where functional safety and reliability are paramount.”
Commenting UltraSoC CEO Rupert Baines said: “UltraSoC is already established as the solution of choice for semiconductor companies who need to understand how their system-on-chip (SoC) products are behaving – yielding dramatically reduced development and debug costs and faster time to market. But those same customers – and investors – are now recognizing the strategic potential for our technology in implementing functional safety and cybersecurity features.”
Over the last 12 months, UltraSoC has made significant progress in terms of customer acquisition, technology development and further strengthening its team. Early in 2019, it disclosed that data storage leader Seagate has licensed its technology: and that in the same market sector, it is supporting Western Digital’s SweRV processor architecture. Other recently announced customers include Alibaba company C-SKY, Esperanto, Kraftway and Microchip.
The company has also developed its core technology, expanding the capabilities of its architecture to address the needs of high-performance computing and exascale systems, announcing a targeted solution automotive lockstep applications, building a stronger ecosystem for heterogeneous designs and the RISC-V open source architecture, and significantly extending its patent portfolio.
