Kandou Bus Closes Series B Investment Round

Lausanne -- July 25, 2018 -- Kandou Bus, S.A., a world leader in development of SerDes IP and chip solutions, has completed its Series B investment round with a $15M investment from Bessemer Venture Partners and Walden Investment. The close of the Series B signifies Kandou’s accomplishment of critical research and development milestones and key design wins.

The resources will enable Kandou to expand research and accelerate the development, productization and deployment of Kandou’s Chord™ signaling SerDes IP licensing and chip solutions. Kandou has developed Chord signaling for enhanced communications between chips inside electronic systems ranging from mobile devices to hyperscale data centers, high performance computing and artificial intelligence/machine learning applications.

“Kandou continues to show excellent progress in the development and deployment of Chord signaling-based solutions” said Bessemer Venture Partners’ Felda Hardymon. “The range of applications for high bandwidth, low power chip interconnect continues to expand. Kandou has now developed four generations of its SerDes IP, proving that Chord signaling substantially outperforms traditional signaling methods by delivering significantly higher bandwidth and lower power. We are confident that Kandou can further develop and deploy Chord signaling in several future generations of chips.”

“We see strong demand from the industry for better chip interconnect solutions,” said Lip-Bu Tan, Chairman, Walden International. “Kandou’s silicon proven SerDes IP enables system architects to design better optimized silicon solutions for faster time-to-market, lower cost and better overall performance.”

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 while consuming half the power or less of traditional differential signaling. Chord signaling is a generalization of differential signaling. Whereas differential signaling is used to transmit a single bit across two correlated wires, Chord signaling transmits multiple bits over multiple correlated wires without paying the price of reduced margin that is common with other signaling methods such as PAM-4. The result is a better board, pin, and silicon area efficiency as compared to existing chip interface solutions while delivering excellent signal integrity through strong resistance to noise encountered in chip-to-chip communication.

“Customer demand for Kandou’s technology continues to grow. We appreciate the confidence that both Bessemer and Walden represent through this investment round,” said Shokrollahi. “This funding helps Kandou respond to increasing demand for Chord signaling architectures and solutions.”

About Bessemer Venture Partners

Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) is a $5B global venture capital firm that invests in consumer, enterprise and healthcare startups from seven offices around the world. One of the longest-standing venture capital firms in the world, BVP invested in the early stages of Pinterest, Twitch, Blue Apron and Skype and has helped 122 of its companies go public, including SendGrid, Twilio, MindBody, Shopify, Wix, Yelp and LinkedIn. Follow us @BessemerVP.

About Walden International

Walden International is a leading international venture capital firm that has provided investors access to cross-border, IT opportunities with the advantage of an unrivaled pan-Asia network since 1987. The firm manages a total of US$2.7 billion in committed capital. Walden International has invested in over 500 companies in 12 countries, with in excess of 104 IPOs on 15 Stock Exchanges and more than 70 M&A exits. Walden’s investments include Ambarella Corp. (NASDAQ: AMBA), Annapurna Labs (acquired by Amazon), Best, Inc. (NYSE: BSTI), Creative Technology (CREA.SI), JobStreet, SINA (NASDAQ: SINA), MindTree (NSE: MTCL.IN), Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (NYSE: SMI, HKSE: 981.HK), GoPro (NASDAQ: GPRO), Aquantia Corp. (NYSE: AQ), Quantenna Communications (NASDAQ: QTNA), AutoNavi, Inphi (NASDAQ: IPHI), Silergy Corp. (TW: 6415), Sinosun Technology (Shenzhen: 300333), and Solaredge Technologies (NASDAQ: SEDG).

About Kandou

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.

http://kandou.com