Kalray raises $7.8 Millions in series B

Kalray raises $7.8 Million in Series B & announces first MPPA^® manycore processor in 28 nm technology integrating 256 cores onto a single silicon chip.

Orsay / Montbonnot Saint Martin, France, Jan. 20, 2011.

Created in 2008, Kalray is a fabless & software company which develops, markets & sells a new generation of manycore processors for Imaging, Telecommunication infrastructures, Data Security & Network Appliances embedded applications.

Kalray's technology is called MPPA® for Multi - Purpose Processor Array and has solved the major two challenges of multi-core processing: the energy efficiency as well as the software scalability.

Led by Joël Monnier, former Vice President of ST Microelectronics, with headcount of 40 Engineers, Kalray is backed by French investment funds, including ACE Management, Inocap, Eurekap, CEA Investissement, Rhône Alpes Creation, Promelys, local funds and other private investors as well as by the French governmental agency OSEO.

The first MPPA^®-256 processor will be available in 2011 and integrates 256 processors onto a single silicon chip through a high bandwidth Network on Chip. MPPA-256 is manufactured in 28 nm technology by world-class foundries for lowest power consumption and highest cost efficiency.

Along with the MPPA^® processor family, Kalray provides customers with its software development environment AccessCore as well as development boards.

The AccessCore® development environment provides a C-based programming model, which speeds up application development and debug. Several programming levels are provided for different user profiles, from Linux support for legacy functions, to a unique high level dataflow environment. Standard GCC & GDB technologies are used for compilation & debug. Processor cores are proprietary and are based on a VLIW low power consumption design, integrating a 32-bit/64-bit floating point calculation unit.

"Kalray's technology has been developed with many OEMs partners across several vertical markets, as well as partnering with third party software vendors, says Joël Monnier, CEO. Our first processor achieves a global processing power of 500 billion operations per second, along with a much lower power consumption than competitive solutions. Embedded designers will get the benefit of high processing power, low power consumption and high level programing to develop innovative applications in the fields of image processing, signal processing, control, communications and data security. The access cost of MPPA processors makes them optimum for all low to medium volume applications".

"For the last two years, Kalray has perfectly achieved its roadmap milestones. This is very rare and has convinced existing and new investors to support the next steps of Kalray's development", says Guy Rigaud, Rhône Alpes Creation.

Kalray previously secured $19.1 Millions in 2008 / 2009.

For the series B funding, Kalray advisor was Edmond de Rothschild Entreprises Patrimoniales.