Carmel Ventures and Ericsson Invest in Adapteva

$3.6M Series-B Round Enhances Delivery of Adapteva’s Parallel Computing Vision

LEXINGTON, MASS., January 16, 2014 – Adapteva Inc., innovators in the field of parallel processing and sponsors of the Parallella project, announced today they have closed a $3.6M Series-B funding round from Carmel Ventures, a premier venture capital firm, and Ericsson, a world-leading communications technology and services vendor. The financing will reinforce Adapteva’s long-term plans for delivering transformative technology – semiconductor chips and computing boards that enable the next generation of parallel computing.

“The potential for major returns in energy efficiency and performance gained from parallel processing are clear, and in fact critical, to support rapid growth in the telecoms industry. This makes innovations such as Adapteva’s very exciting for Ericsson and for the customers we work with,” said Sebastian Tolstoy, Ericsson VP Business Development, PA Radio, BNET.

“Parallel processing and high performance computing (HPC) are of huge interest to us as these markets are developing quickly and changing dramatically,” said Ori Bendori, partner at Carmel Ventures. “Adapteva’s approach is very different than the traditional silicon vendor model and we believe this could lead an industry transformation – just the type of innovation we like to invest in.”

Adapteva, founded in 2008, has developed a unique, scalable and energy-efficient architecture and IP for parallel processing, delivering two parallel processing accelerator chips in 2011. The 16-core and 64-core Epiphany chips are C/C++ programmable floating-point capable RISC multicore processors able to deliver 5GFLOPS/Watt – leading the industry for instruction bound workloads.

To bring Adapteva’s solution to a wider audience Adapteva launched the Parallella Project in 2012. With $898,921 raised via a Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign, Adapteva developed the Parallella board, a credit card-sized computer for $99. The Parallella has an ARM processor, an FPGA and the Epiphany parallel processor working together on the board, all consuming less than 5 Watts of power. Initial shipments started in July 2013 and shipment to all 6,300 backers is being finalized in Q1 of 2014.

“Adapteva’s open source, community-driven approach to parallel programming and processing is a breakthrough for the computing industry,” said Andreas Olofsson, CEO and Founder of Adapteva. “Even prior to shipping all our initial orders, we have more than 5,000 active followers in our community. With this investment and the upcoming fulfillment of our Kickstarter shipments, we expect the momentum to continue to snowball.”

The resounding success of the Parallella board highlights the urgent need and demand for open-source parallel processing resources as well as the potential of the Adapteva Epiphany architecture. The community has many diverse ideas where parallel programming can be used for computation rich and parallel friendly applications. As the market matures, Adapteva will continue to develop higher density chips and different form factor boards for these applications.

The flexibility of Adapteva’s parallel co-processor approach versus the traditional multicore CPU enables a scalable solution. Multiple Epiphany chips linked together or larger scale chips can increase to 4096 cores or more. The architecture lends itself for integration into complex appliances and battery powered devices with more computational needs, such as telecommunications and embedded vision.

The raw processing required for telecommunications technology and the growth of the market demands more energy efficient and scalable processing. Technology like Adapteva’s can significantly advance the use of parallel programming and processing in communications equipment.

About Carmel Ventures

With over $600 million currently under management, several successful exits, and a growing portfolio of promising start-ups, Carmel is among Israel’s top-tier venture capital funds. Founded in 2000 by pioneers and leaders of the Israeli high tech industry, Carmel provides significant capital and active, hands-on support through the growth cycle of its portfolio companies and is recognized as a true company building fund in Israel. For more information, visit www.carmelventures.com.

About Ericsson

Ericsson is a world-leading provider of communications technology and services. We are enabling the Networked Society with efficient real-time solutions that allow us all to study, work and live our lives more freely, in sustainable societies around the world.

Our offering comprises services, software and infrastructure within Information and Communications Technology for telecom operators and other industries. Today 40 percent of the world’s mobile traffic goes through Ericsson networks and we support customers’ networks servicing more than 2.5 billion subscriptions.

We are more than 110,000 people working with customers in more than 180 countries. Founded in 1876, Ericsson is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden. In 2012 the company’s net sales were SEK 227.8 billion (USD 33.8 billion). Ericsson is listed on NASDAQ OMX, Stockholm and NASDAQ, New York stock exchanges.

For more information, visit http://www.ericsson.com/.

About Adapteva

Adapteva, Inc. is a privately held semiconductor manufacturer based in Lexington, Massachusetts that has developed a highly energy efficient and scalable multicore processor chip, designed for parallel computing. Adapteva’s groundbreaking Epiphany multicore architecture represents a new class of massively parallel computer architectures that will disrupt a wide range of end markets from compact low power devices to next generation supercomputers. Adapteva is also the sponsor of the Parallella Project and the designer of the Parallella Board. Powered by the Epiphany chips, the Parallella is a credit card-sized, open source platform available to participants to explore, prototype and contribute to an open source library of expertise, information and code samples for the benefit of the parallel processing developer community. For more information on the company visit: http://www.adapteva.com or the Parallella Project site at http://www.parallella.org.