Post a CommentMulticore programming tool startup garners $10M in VC funding
By Ann Steffora Mutschler, Senior Editor -- Electronic News, 4/23/2007
Ontario, Canada-based multicore processor programming tool supplier RapidMind Inc. reported today that it has closed $10 million of venture capital funding,
The funding round was led by Ventures West Capital Ltd. EdgeStone Capital Partners and BDC Venture Capital also participated.
RapidMind said it will use the funding to work on delivering its software development platform for applications running on multi-core and stream processors.
Specifically, the investment will be used to grow the company’s sales organization and to drive marketing to expand its customer base in the high performance computing and enterprise markets.
RapidMind noted that software performance has traditionally benefited from the increasing clock speed of processors but additional speed gains are now limited by the laws of physics.
In response, the company has observed that processor vendors now focus on putting multiple cores on each processor to achieve increased performance, but traditionally, harvesting performance from these additional cores requires programmers to use complex parallel programming tools and methodologies specific to each vendor’s processor architecture.
The company said with its approach, software developers can use standard C++ programming to create high-performance applications that leverage the performance of GPUs, the Cell Broadband Engine or multi-core CPUs without porting or any architecture specific knowledge.
Robin Axon, partner at Ventures West said in a statement, “If programmers can’t adapt to multi-core programming, 2007 will be the year that Moore’s Law stopped driving four decades of technology innovation. These are the kinds of watershed events that venture capitalists live for. Add to the mix a market driven company leveraging years of academic research to elegantly solve this industry-wide problem, and stars align. You just have to be a part of it.”
As part of the funding round, Axon, along with John Kemp-Welch of BDC Venture Capital and Laura Lenz of EdgeStone Capital Partners have joined RapidMind’s board of directors. Duncan Hill, founder and CTO of Think Dynamics (acquired by IBM in 2003), remains an independent board member. President and CEO Ray DePaul, and co-founder and chief scientist, Michael McCool also remain on the board.
