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Print Edition StoriesThursday, May 28, 2009
Supercomputer firm SiCortex closes doors
By Mass High Tech Staff
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High performance computing systems maker SiCortex Inc. of Maynard has shut its doors, ceasing operations yesterday.
Maynard-based SiCortex has let go the majority of its staff and the company is looking for a buyer for its assets, according to various sources, including a blog post by laid off engineer Jeff Darcy, and the legal notice stating that Gerbsman Partners has been retained to sell its assets, posted to the Blog of Intellectual Capital.
SiCortex has taken funding from Chevron Technology Ventures, Flagship Ventures, JK&B Capital, Polaris Venture Partners, and Prism VentureWorks. The company filed notice with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this month that it was raising $1 million. According to the site HPCwire.com, which had the initial story, a source inside the company said that SiCortex's venture backers pulled outof its latest funding.
The company originally opened a Series B round in 2006, and closed it in February, having raised $37 million. At that time, SiCortex officials said it hoped the Series B round would be enough to bring it to profitability, but it did not rule out raising more funds.
In addition to co-founder John Mucci, SiCortex counts among its board members Albert DaValle, Jr. of JK&B Capital, Bill Seifert of Prism VentureWorks and Bill Strecker of Flagship.
In April, SiCortex announced a deal for the use of its high-productivity computing (HPC) systems in predicting and preventing fibrillation, a form of heart arrhythmia, at the University of Michigan’s Center for Arrhythmia Research. In February, the University of Magdeburg in Germany purchased one of SiCortex’s high-capacity systems for use in fluid dynamics research, representing SiCortex’s second installation in Europe. The first, at the University of Cambridge in England and configured to assist in computational chemistry research, was completed earlier this year.
SiCortex sold a total of 60 machines in 2008, according to CEO Chris Stone in a previous interview, and SiCortex had hired two distributors in Europe over the past six months and was in the process of adding two more. According to Stone, the company had also received inquiries from other parts of the world, particularly Dubai and Australia, but was holding back making any sales in those regions until a support network was established in each region.
The company had been pulling in accolades recently. Earlier this month SiCortex was named by the Boston Business Journal as a winner at its Green Business Awards in the Invention category. That same week, it was named to AlwaysOn's East 100 list of top technology companies.
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