Bessemer Venture Partners Invests $15 Million in Kandou

Kandou to Expand Research & Development

July 26, 2016 -- Kandou Bus, S.A., the world’s highest performance and lowest energy SerDes technology company, has announced that it has completed a $15M investment with Bessemer Venture Partners. The resources will enable Kandou to expand research and accelerate the development, productization and deployment of Kandou’s Chord™ signaling SerDes technology. Kandou has developed Chord signaling for enhanced communications between chips inside electronic systems ranging from cell phones to servers and high performance computing.

“We see Chord signaling as a game changer in semiconductors,” said Bessemer venture capitalist Felda Hardymon. “The demand for higher performance and lower power consumption in computing systems necessitates fundamental changes in semiconductor interconnect solutions. Kandou’s technology comes at a time when existing chip link technologies are failing. We are confident that Kandou can further develop and deploy Chord signaling in several future generations of chips.”

Kandou CEO and Founder Amin Shokrollahi’s extensive background in information theory and coding-based signaling led to the invention of Chord signaling. The technology delivers 2-4x more bandwidth and half the power consumption of traditional differential signaling. It achieves this by sending multiple bits over multiple correlated wires within each clock cycle versus differential signaling’s one bit over two correlated wires. In addition to improved performance, the result is better board, pin and silicon area efficiency as compared to existing chip interface solutions. This approach also delivers excellent signal integrity, strong resistance to common-mode and simultaneous switching noise, and a reduction of inter-symbol interference.

This financing announcement comes after several other key milestones in 2016 including: presenting a paper at DesignCon that was recognized as a Best Paper, announcing Marvell Technology Group as a licensee of Kandou’s Glasswing™ chip-to-chip link technology, and Kandou’s Glasswing IP compliance with the newly-released JEDEC specification for multi-wire interfaces called JESD247.

“Bessemer’s investment provides Kandou the opportunity to significantly expand research and development for Chord signaling architectures and solutions,” said Shokrollahi. “We’re seeing growing demand on multiple fronts for our Chord signaling technology, and we are now much better positioned to meet this need.”

About Bessemer Venture Partners:

Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP), is a $4B venture capital firm, investing in startups at every stage, in every corner of the globe. Many of today’s most exciting category leaders are BVP funded, including Pinterest (BVP is the largest shareholder and first invested in 2011), Blue Apron (BVP first funded with a seed investment), Fuze (BVP first invested in 2012) and Snapdeal (2011 marked BVP first investment). BVP track record of outstanding investments includes 117 IPOs (most recently Twilio, Shopify, Box, Mindbody and Wix) Along the way, we’ve seen a number of our most exciting and innovative startups become part of something larger. Recent examples include: Periscope (seed funded by Bessemer) which sold to Twitter before even launching a product and is now industry-standard for streaming live-video, Twitch, which was acquired by Amazon for ~$1B, and Skybox Imaging, which was bought by Google in 2014, marking the first big acquisition in the new race for Space.

About Kandou Bus, S.A.

Kandou Bus, S.A. is pioneering the world’s highest performance and lowest energy SerDes technologies through the use of its disruptive Chord™ signaling technology. Leading semiconductor companies, including Marvell (MRVL), use Kandou to deliver more compute power in a smaller form factor, at lower cost and less energy consumption. The company is an active participant and promoter of standards bodies including OIF, IEEE, and JEDEC.