Press Releases
CriticalBlue Closes $3.7M Second Round Funding
Herald Ventures Leads New Financing, CriticalBlue Signs First Customer In Japan
San Jose, California - June 15, 2006 - CriticalBlue, a provider of tools for accelerating software in embedded microprocessor applications has announced the closure of its B round financing. The funding round was led by Herald Ventures and was fully supported by existing investors Pentech Ventures and LanzaTech Ventures, as well as a number of Silicon Valley angels. The funds will be used to expand the global sales and support organization in alignment with the growing number of customer engagements involving CriticalBlue's revolutionary coprocessor synthesis solution, Cascade.
"The addition of Herald Ventures to our investors and the re-participation of Pentech, Lanza techVentures and our angel investors give us a solid basis for the next phase of the company's development. We have just signed our first large customer in Japan and have added local technical support resources over there as well as in the US. We continue to see strong interest from software centric chip design teams in application areas as diverse as printers, cameras, wireless devices, telecom encryption and audio/video," stated David Stewart, CEO, CriticalBlue.
Coprocessor synthesis is typically used by customers who wish to accelerate new or legacy embedded software performance, reduce platform power consumption for a given performance point, add longevity to a silicon platform through the ability to reprogram it, or support multiple algorithms in a single programmable accelerator block.
"There is a clear trend towards multiple processing units in today's platform designs. It is a reality that many of these processing units must be derived from the application itself - given the normal constraints of performance/power/area trade-offs. Clear feedback from customer engagements supports the view that the transparency and effectiveness of CriticalBlue's Cascade technology provides a powerful answer to the need for application specific multiprocessing platforms," stated Lucio Lanza, Lanza techVentures and CriticalBlue board member.
"We were attracted to this business because of the potential for Cascade to become the standard tool for engineers to bridge the gap between software and hardware within SoC designs, as well as the experienced management team and existing investors," commented Taymour Ezzat of Herald Ventures.
About CriticalBlue
CriticalBlue delivers Cascade, a design tool that synthesizes optimized programmable coprocessors to accelerate embedded software within platform SoCs. Cascade analyses executable software code to accelerate identified functions by offloading those functions from the main processor onto a coprocessor. It then automatically creates a broad range of coprocessor architecture and implementation options to enable designers to achieve the requisite performance, area and power trade-offs, while minimizing project risk and development time. Cascade is used by both semiconductor and system design companies. For more information visit www.criticalblue.com.
About Herald Ventures
Herald Ventures II is a venture capital fund, managed by Herald Investment Management, focused primarily on investing in early stage unquoted companies in the information technology, media and communications sectors in the UK.
For more information, please contact:
David Stewart
CriticalBlue
+1 408 467 5091
Leslie Cumming
Skye Marketing Communications
+ 1 415 285 2352