Stretch is a fabless semiconductor company that delivers a family of software configurable processors, including the S7000 family. Its devices are configurable through C/C++ programming tools and are used worldwide in video processing, machine vision, networking, and wireless applications. The company is led by president and CEO Craig Lytle and has more than sixty employees with offices in Sunnyvale, Shanghai, Krefeld, and Tokyo. Stretch has received 23 patent awards. The company raised capital in a Series C and plans to use proceeds to expand adoption of its S7000-based solutions and to develop next-generation products. Stretch develops software-configurable processors and provides related hardware and software solutions. The company is based in Sunnyvale, California and also operates offices in Krefeld, Germany and Tokyo, Japan. It has more than sixty employees across its offices. Stretch announced a $10M mezzanine financing to support increased manufacturing capacity and the tape-out of its third-generation devices. Management says the funds provide the financial security to scale operations and pursue profitability. The raise is intended to help the company move its product roadmap into higher-volume production. Stretch designs hybrid RISC–FPGA chips and tailored software targeted at surveillance cameras and other markets that need low-cost, high-performance programmability, including wireless, broadcast, and machine vision. Its chips take analog video and compress it into forms that can be more easily stored and transmitted for increasingly sophisticated cameras (including H.264-capable systems). The company says it can make its chips for as little as a quarter of rival DSP costs and competes with digital signal processors from firms such as Texas Instruments. Stretch began shipping its first chips in 2005, shipped a second-generation chip in October, and is planning a third generation; the company has 60 employees. It has licensed processor technology and tools from Tensilica and was founded in 2002 by Albert Wang, formerly chief scientist at Synopsys and Tensilica. Stretch is using new funding to expand production and roll out new chip versions.

Total raised

$30M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Series C

Latest activity

Feb 2012