GigaIO, a creator of data centre rack-scale architecture for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) solutions, has completed a Series B round of funding totalling USD14.7 million.
Impact Venture Capital led the funding round, which was oversubscribed by 50 per cent and included participation from Mark IV Capital, Lagomaj Capital, SK Hynix, and Four Palms Ventures.
GigaIO has fundamentally changed the HPC and AI landscape by creating the world’s only enterprise-class, universal composable fabric―an open standards solution with limitless flexibility, cloudlike agility, and an added layer of security. This enables faster time to achieve results as workloads run as if they were using components inside one server but harness the power of many nodes, all communicating within one seamless universal fabric.
Through the new funding, GigaIO will aggressively expand its market and channel development by recruiting more partners and expanding channel programs. GigaIO will devote more resources to customer development and partner development programs – aimed at accelerating sales and marketing efforts.
GigaIO’s Universal Composable Fabric, FabreXtm, orchestrates workloads by configuring any HPC and AI resource on the fly and integrating networking, storage, memory, and specialised accelerators into a single-system cluster fabric. By increasing the flexibility and agility of HPC and AI environments, GigaIO’s solution significantly reduces costs through increased utilisation and minimised server requirements, saving on cooling, power, and footprint. GigaIO is disrupting the HPC and AI space by democratising access to expensive specialised resources such as accelerators by sharing them across users and workloads, and by making it simple to implement for IT managers.
“We have a tremendous technology and a development team with incredible expertise gained through years of working on some of the highest performing interconnects at companies such as Cray, Sun Microsystems, Cisco, Emulex, and QLogic,” says Alan Benjamin, President and CEO of GigaIO. “Today, by completing this funding round, we are better positioned to get the technology into the hands of more customers and channel partners and to increase traction among commercial and other customers.
“Due to the pandemic, hardware testing has been difficult. Since the start of the year however, we’ve been able to get equipment into facilities and the results have been fantastic for us,” he says. “Our customers are thrilled with the results and impressed by what they can do with the technology, and to be blunt, they’re amazed that we’re getting results that the industry has been striving to achieve for more than a decade. With strong demand for a universal composable fabric, we’ve seen tremendous support from the investment community. The oversubscription provides a solid runway for future investments.”
PCIe Gen 4, a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard that moves data at high bandwidth and low latency between multiple components, is the technology computers, data centers, and the wireless industry rely on to enable the next generation of mobile and desktop applications. The same technology will also enable the efficient use of accelerators, including moving data out of storage and into accelerators more quickly. With PCIe Gen 5 and CXL, GigaIO will be able to extend to make use of pools of memory to create a shareable, commonplace composable element.
Jack Crawford, Founding General Partner at Impact Venture Capital, adds: “We are excited to lead this funding round, including a co-investment from SK Hynix, and believe that GigaIO’s game-changing technology and team will continue to revolutionize the way that organizations manage data.” “We believe that the company is a catalyst for the next generation of data and storage performance and represents an ideal artificial intelligence startup that we seek to partner with and invest in.”
“Our further investment in GigaIO is rooted in our confidence that the power of HPC and AI can solve critical challenges at every level,” says Felix Williams, Founder and Managing Director of Lagomaj Capital. “The GigaIO team is working to enable the next generation of computational infrastructure, and we are proud to call them partners.”
“We are thrilled to partner with Alan and the entire GigaIO team on their journey to establish a new model for data center infrastructure,” says Michael Beaudoin, Director of Private Equities at Mark IV Capital. “By leveraging the power of a universal composable fabric, GigaIO is delivering a powerful solution, making HPC and AI more accessible to its customers.”
