France, Renault rally round Kalray
These companies have contributed to the second tranche of a €26.3 million (about $31.5 million) funding round agreed in June 2017 (see Kalray gains Chinese backing in $26 million funding round).
The second tranche was originally intended to be delivered by the end of 2017 through Safran Corporate Ventures, Asian investment fund Pengpai, and the long-standing shareholders ACE Management, CEA Investissement, EUREKAP! and Inocap Gestion. Pengpai is a France-based venture capital fund that directs Chinese investment towards European technology-based companies with growth potential in Asia.
Since its spin-off from CEA-Leti in 2008, Kalray has developed a series of massively parallel many-core processors for use in data centers, networking and in embedded applications although high volume applications appear to have been hard to find. The company has now decided to focus on datacenter and intelligent vehicle applications.
The company said the latest funding round it intended to enable deployment of the existing Coolidge processor – Kalray’s third generation and one that actively supports machine learning – and the final development of a next-generation processor, scheduled to be launched in 2019.
Next: Cars and defence
“Kalray has been developing a new type of processor for the past 10 years, which offers key features — the ratio of computing power to power consumption, and the ability to integrate a large number of critical functions onto a single chip, especially for the new-generation cars that we will be developing,” said François Dossa, head of Alliance Ventures, the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi venture capital fund, in statement issued by Kalray. “The Kalray processors are already fitted in the Symbioz autonomous concept-car, which we have been testing for several months. This investment in Kalray is indeed very strategic,” he added.
Kalray has been supported by the French Defense Procurement Agency (DGA) of the French Ministry of the Armed Forces since 2010. Definvest, launched in November 2017 and managed by BPI France, has now acquired stake in Kalray. “Kalray is Definvest’s first investment and I know many will follow. This first investment sends out a strong signal to all entrepreneurs, researchers and engineers: National Defense believes in you, invests for you,” said Florence Parly, France’s Minister of the Armed Forces.
Related links and articles:
News articles:
Kalray gains Chinese backing in $26 million funding round
Kalray’s Coolidge processor adds deep learning acceleration
Kalray turns to neural networks
French parallel processing research wins €32m funding
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