Kandou Secures $56 Million in Series C Funding

Investment by Existing and New Investors Brings Total Funding to Nearly $100 Million

LAUSANNE, Switzerland, Sept. 23, 2019 -- Kandou, a global leader in connectivity IP and chip solutions, today announced an additional investment of $56 million, through a consortium of institutional, strategic, and private investors, bringing the total investment in the company to nearly $100 million. The investment will be used to scale all aspects of Kandou’s operations and to expand the development and deployment of its high speed, low power interconnect devices.

Founded in 2011, Kandou’s most recent technical achievement was the design and introduction of the Glasswing™ Ultra-Short Reach SerDes, the first and only technology that delivers one Tbps of throughput at just one Watt of power consumption. The company will begin leveraging many of the innovations in its IP portfolio to launch a series of high speed, low power interconnect products for consumer and networking applications.

“High speed connectivity inside and between devices is one of the biggest challenges the electronics industry is facing. We appreciate the confidence that our investors have shown in our ability to innovate, build, and deliver world-class solutions to this challenge,” said Amin Shokrollahi, Founder and CEO of Kandou. “We are rapidly expanding our IP footprint in the industry, and we will soon be shipping our first chips designed for the upcoming generation of USB interconnect in consumer devices. This round of funding ensures that we deliver.”

“Bessemer is delighted to participate in another investment round with Kandou as it goes to market with technology that will make profound advancements in communications between consumer electronic devices,” said Felda Hardymon, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. “Kandou continues to demonstrate and deliver industry leading technologies that provide a path for enhanced electronic products for several generations. We are excited to see Kandou’s innovations come to the market.”

“Kandou’s innovative signaling techniques and circuit implementations demonstrate unprecedented increases in link data throughput and reductions in power consumption,” said Pär Lange, Investment Partner at Swisscom Ventures. “Major industry players have taken notice and we are pleased to support Kandou in this next step of growth.”

“Creating power efficient, high speed chip-to-chip communication solutions is the mainstay for Kandou,” said Frederic Wohlwend, Managing Director at Forestay Capital. “Their disruptive technology and unique approach to solving interconnect issues, along with their track record of product execution, presented a compelling reason for us to invest.”

The complete list of institutional and strategic investors in the Series C round is: Bessemer Venture Partners, Columbia Lake Partners, Digital Transformation Fund, Fayerweather Capital Partners, Forestay Capital, Kreos Capital, Raging Capital, Swisscom Ventures, and Walden International.

About Bessemer Venture Partners

Bessemer Venture Partners 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 (we are the largest shareholder and first invested in 2011), Blue Apron (BVP first funded with a seed investment), Fuze (we first invested in 2012) and Snapdeal (2011 marked our first investment) Our 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 Swisscom Ventures

Swisscom Ventures is the venture capital arm of Swisscom AG, the leading telecom and ICT provider in Switzerland. Since 2007, we have invested in over 50 technology companies from our offices in Switzerland (Zurich and Bern) and the USA (Silicon Valley).

About Forestay Capital

Founded in 2017, Forestay invests in the tech sector and is focused on innovative revenue-generating technology companies, in Europe, Israel and the US, that challenge established models, primarily through software and data. It is part of Waypoint Capital, chaired by Ernesto Bertarelli, which supports a broad portfolio of leading asset management and investment businesses.

About Kandou

Founded in 2011, Kandou is the innovative leader in high-speed, energy efficient, chip-to-chip link solutions critical to the evolution of the electronics industry. Kandou enables a better-connected world by offering disruptive technology through licensing and standard products that empower the devices we use every day to become smaller, more energy efficient and more cost effective.

Kandou has a strong IP portfolio that includes Chord™ signaling, which has been adopted into industry specifications by JEDEC and the OIF. These innovations and implementations deliver a fundamental advance in interconnect technology that lowers the power consumed and improves the performance of chip links, unlocking new capabilities for customer devices and systems.

Kandou is a fabless semiconductor company headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland with offices in Europe, North America and Asia.

For more information, please go to http://www.kandou.com