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Fabless chipmaker startup Adapteva Inc. has taken on its first round of institutional funding, a Series A commitment of $1.5 million that founder Andreas Olofsson says should be the only funding the company needs.
Adapteva, based in Lexington, makes programmable, low-power microprocessors for specific niche applications, such as airborne radar or portable ultrasound — basically anywhere a programmable processor that can run on batteries is needed.
“We offer orders of magnitude better power efficiency compared to anything else out there,” Olofsson said.
His background lends credence to his claim. Olofsson spent ten years at Analog Devices Inc. designing digital signal processor chips. While at ADI, he helped design what Olofsson says at the time was the highest-performing chip in the world. But a lack of demand for it, and competing technologies such as IBM Corp.’s Cell processor, put the chip on ADI’s back burner.
In 2007, Olofsson left ADI to strike out on his own and in the beginning of 2008 founded Adapteva. The company now has 10 employees, mixed between full-time and part-time, Olofsson said. This first institutional funding came from BittWare Inc., according to Olofsson. BittWare is a Concord, N.H.-based maker of computer boards that use DSPs such as those made by ADI and the ones being developed by Adapteva.
BittWare sells into the primary target markets for Adapteva — defense and life sciences. Adapteva has prototypes already built and will have product ready to be sold in 2010, Olofsson said.
“Then it is just a mater of how quickly these sales materialize, so if everything goes well we could be profitable in 2011, without having to take any more funding,” he said.
While Adapteva is focusing on niche markets initially, Olofsson says that the applications for its chips are almost endless.
“This technology is really very fundamental and can be applied in many other markets,” he said. “We wouldn’t have the cell phone today if we didn’t have low-power programmable processors.”
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