UltraSoC secures £5 million investment to expand global operations

UltraSoC has announced plans to significantly expand its global operations to meet new opportunities in the secure, high reliability and high safety systems markets. This latest expansion follows the successful £5 million funding round for UltraSoC, which includes new investors including security-focused venture capital firm eCAPITAL and space technology ecosystem specialist Seraphim Capital , and existing investors  Indaco Venture Partners , Octopus Ventures , Oxford Capital , Techgate and business angel Guillaume d'Eyssautier.

As part of its expansion plan, UltraSoC will recruit hardware and software engineers for its headquarters in Cambridge, UK and its design center in Bristol. UltraSoC also plans to open an engineering center in Warsaw, Poland to develop data science and machine learning technologies for it. The company will also expand its global network of customer support engineers and increase its commercial influence in major markets such as Europe, the United States, Japan and China.

The new round of financing was significantly oversubscribed, thanks to the company's successful early stage development, during which it completed a series of important technical developments and won a large number of new customers. Willi Mannheims, Managing Partner of eCAPITAL, and James Bruegger, Managing Partner and Investment Director of Seraphim Capital, have joined the UltraSoC Board of Directors as Investor Director and Observer respectively.

Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, Chairman of the Board at UltraSoC, said: “Developers are struggling to find trusted solutions to meet security and safety requirements. UltraSoC is uniquely positioned to deliver the capabilities to enable these capabilities in the underlying hardware. eCAPITAL and Seraphim bring insight and expertise from both the security space and the aerospace ecosystem, where safety and reliability are critical. In addition to the new investors, I am delighted to have the continued support of UltraSoC’s key existing investors, who have already confirmed their investment in this latest round.”

Rupert Baines, CEO of UltraSoC, said: “UltraSoC has become the go-to solution for semiconductor companies when they need to understand the behaviour of their SoC products, helping them to significantly reduce development and debug costs and accelerate time to market. Now, these same customers and investors are recognising the strategic potential of our technology to implement functional safety and cybersecurity features. This round of funding will enable us to seize this opportunity and I am confident that our unique innovation strengths can meet these needs.”

eCAPITAL is one of Germany’s leading venture capital firms and has been actively supporting leading technology innovators since 1999. Commenting on behalf of eCAPITAL, Willi Mannheims said: “We are very excited to be joining forces with UltraSoC, a company at the forefront of embedded analytics. UltraSoC has developed a novel cybersecurity technology that places anomaly detection directly into the chip, enabling hardware-based threat detection. This can identify attacks very quickly, in microseconds rather than milliseconds. It is also more robust and reliable than traditional techniques because it is ‘lower than the OS’, making it very difficult for attackers to detect, circumvent or subvert it.”

James Bruegger of Seraphim added: “At Seraphim we are focused on the space technology ecosystem and we are always looking for foundational technologies that can impact the way the industry operates and creates value. Therefore, anything that impacts the way safety and security is done is highly relevant to us and we immediately saw the opportunity in UltraSoC’s capabilities. This is not just for space applications, but also for automotive, industrial and medical. In fact, it can be used in almost every technology sector.”

UltraSoC has made significant progress in the past year in terms of customer acquisition, technology development and further strengthening its already impressive team. Earlier in 2019, the company announced that Seagate, a world leader in data storage, had purchased a license for the technology; in the same market segment, UltraSoC also supports Western Digital's SweRV processor architecture. Other recently announced customers include Alibaba subsidiary C-SKY, Esperanto, Kraftway and Microchip. UltraSoC has also made great progress in the development of its core technology, by extending its architectural capabilities to meet the needs of high-performance computing and very large and complex (exascale) systems; announced targeted solutions for automotive lockstep applications, built a stronger ecosystem for heterogeneous designs and the RISC-V open source architecture, and significantly expanded its patent portfolio.