Neuroblade CEO and co-founder, Elad Sity, speaks to Digital Bulletin about the company’s $83m funding round and growth plans
DB: Congratulations on the Series B funding round, what are your initial thoughts on the raise?
We are very proud of this funding round, not only because of the funds that will help us grow further, but most importantly because of the composition of investors that have participated in this round. It includes a mix of financial VCs and all of our investors from previous rounds, along with highly strategic companies that are either design partners or part of our supply chain, and all are leading companies in their respective fields.
DB: Could you tell us a bit about NeuroBlade and its ambitions?
Data is exploding, stored data doubles itself every 18-24 months. This presents new challenges to data processing, and on the upside it sets up new opportunities for companies to gain more insights and faster. We built a data analytics accelerator to assist organisations in doing just that. Just as NVIDIA revolutionised the data centre with their GPU for compute bounded workloads, as data becomes more critical, NeuroBlade aims to be the defacto data centre solution for data intensive workloads.
DB: How is the $83 million going to allow NeuroBlade to accelerate what it is doing?
The funding will be used to bring our technology to market, which means expanding our technical team and building a larger presence in the US and worldwide, establishing partnerships, and ramping up the mass production lines. We plan to grow our design teams to enrich the product further. However, we are only scratching the surface of our data analytics acceleration and computational memory technology. Further growth will enable us to bring more of these ideas to life and we look forward to the future.
DB: It takes the company’s funding to-date to $110 million, are we likely to see any further rounds in the near future?
We have finished the round with quite significant oversubscription, so the options are out there. As we move forward, hitting our target KPIs, we will look into bringing more funding in, to enable faster growth and expansion to more markets and additional workloads.
DB: What is different about NeuroBlade when it comes to data analytics?
NeuroBlade’s data analytics accelerator is an end-to-end full system solution. We brought our experience from multiple fields; hardware, silicon, software, and algorithms to build the entire system. Most importantly, NeuroBlade’s accelerator is based on our unique processing in memory technology – XRAM. XRAM can be thought of as “steroids” to build hardware for data processing, and it enables us to reach new levels of performance over other solutions in the market.
DB: Could you speak to us about some of the highlights of 2021 to-date?
Obviously, this funding round is a major milestone, but even more important is shipping our IMPU server solution to our early design partners. It’s been several years developing the technologies and gathering market insights that this product is built upon. Having customers evaluating this is the fruition of this long and exciting process and marks the shift from a technology company to a product company.
DB: NeuroBlade is growing quickly, but could you outline the long-term vision for the business?
NeuroBlade’s primary focus at this stage is speeding up data analytics, building strategic partnerships, and a broad customer base. While doing so, we further develop our data analytics accelerator and processing in-memory technology, which are both the foundations to build the next “GPU for data,” handling more workloads and more geographies, both on public cloud and the On-Prem markets.
DB: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
The data centre has been rapidly changing over the last few years, as well as computer architectures. We at NeuroBlade, are proud to take part in these evolutions that will affect us for years to come. And hopefully, by enabling faster analysis of data, we’ll make our contribution towards building a better world for us all.
