Carlsbad-based GigaIO has completed a Series B funding round totaling $14.7 million.
The startup is seeing great success with its composable infrastructure fabric technology that allow data centers to get the flexibility of the cloud for their own infrastructure. The company’s software and hardware platform enables artificial intelligence users to share expensive computing resources like accelerators.
“Our technology allows researchers and data scientists the world over to shorten their time to result by gaining access to more resources faster,” said Jacqueline Arsivaud, GigaIO’s VP of marketing.
As a privately held company, GigaIO does not release revenue but one sure sign of recent traction: “We’ve sold more in the past six months than in the company’s entire history up to then,” Arsivaud said.
Impact Venture Capital led the most recent funding round, which was oversubscribed by 50%.
Other participants included Mark IV Capital, Lagomaj Capital, SK Hynix and Four Palms Ventures.
Company Founder Still Chief Architect
“This is like the Holy Grail for our industry,” said Alan Benjamin, president and CEO of GigaIO.
“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 like Cray, Sun Microsystems, Cisco, Emulex and QLogic.”
Benjamin originally came to San Diego to work for Hewlett Packard and has been running GigaIO since 2017.
GigaIO − pronounced giga-I O − was founded in 2012 by Joey Maitra, who invented the technology and continues to serve as the company’s chief architect.
GigaIO actually came out of La Jolla’s EvoNexus incubator − and also was part of the Connect Capital Match program.
“Big congrats to our friends at Giga.IO,” tweeted Mike Krenn, president and CEO at Connect, after the latest funding round was announced. “I remember meeting Alan years ago, and VCs telling him that what they were trying to do couldn’t be done.”
GigaIO actually launched its first product line in 2019.
As the global data explosion and AI revolution continue to unfold, Benjamin said global computing, storage and networking infrastructure are undergoing a fundamental transformation.
“Since the start of this year, we’ve been able to get equipment into facilities and the results have been fantastic for us,” he said. “With strong demand for a universal composable fabric, we’ve seen tremendous support from the investment community.”
The funding round’s oversubscription “provides a solid runway for future investments,” he added.
Plans to Expand Market, Channel Development
GigaIO’s technology configures any HPC and AI resource on the fly by integrating networking, storage, memory and specialized accelerators into a single-system cluster fabric.
Benjamin said that by increasing the flexibility and agility of HPC and AI environments, FabreXtm significantly reduces costs through increased utilization and minimized server requirements, saving on “cooling, power and footprint.”
With the new funding, GigaIO plans to aggressively expand its market and channel development by recruiting more partners and expanding channel programs.
The company currently has 30 employees and Benjamin said there are plans to add as many as 10 more by year’s end. “It’s a difficult hiring environment right now but we’ve been very successful in being able to recruit good people.”
Industry insiders say GigaIO is disrupting the HPC and AI space by “democratizing” access to previously expensive, specialized resources such as accelerators by sharing them across users and workloads — and by making it simple to implement for IT managers.
“We believe that GigaIO’s game-changing technology and team will continue to revolutionize the way that organizations manage data,” said Jack Crawford, founding general partner at Impact Venture Capital. “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,” said Felix Williams, founder and managing director of Lagomaj Capital.
In July of this year, San Diego Supercomputer Center included FabreXtm as the technology of choice for the new Prototype National Research Platform (NRP) funded by the National Science Foundation cyberinfrastructure ecosystem, an innovative, all-in-one system designed as a testbed for leading-edge research centers to expedite science and enable transformative discoveries.
GigaIO
Founded: 2012
Headquarters: Carlsbad
CEO: Alan Benjamin
Employees: 30
Website: www.gigaio.com
Contact: 760-487-8395
Notable: Company says its technology “will end the tyranny of the motherboard.”
