Participated · Equity · Apr 2018

Nantero is a Woburn, MA-based nanotechnology company developing next-generation memory using carbon nanotubes. Its core product is NRAM, a high-density, high-speed nonvolatile random-access memory for standalone and embedded applications. The company says NRAM’s applications include smartphones, tablets, enterprise systems, notebooks and desktops, as well as automotive and industrial uses. Nantero intends to use the $29.7m funding to bring multiple products to market and is working with licensees on additional applications of its nanotube-based technology. The round included Dell Technologies Capital, Cisco Investments, Kingston Technology Corporation, CFT Capital, Schlumberger and three strategic, undisclosed semiconductor-industry investors; the company has raised over $120m to date. Nantero has more than a dozen partners and customers, and Fujitsu Semiconductor and Mie Fujitsu Semiconductor are slated to be the first to bring NRAM to market in 2019; the company recently established a WFOE office in Beijing to expand in China. Nantero is developing NRAM, a next-generation, carbon-nanotube-based high-density, high-speed nonvolatile random access memory for standalone and embedded applications. The technology targets smartphones, tablets, enterprise systems, notebook and desktop computers, as well as automotive and industrial markets. The company reports more than a dozen partners and customers in the consumer electronics, enterprise systems, and semiconductor industries actively working on NRAM. Nantero also works with licensees to develop additional applications of its core nanotube-based technology. Led by Co-Founder and CEO Greg Schmergel, the company intends to use new funding to support partners in bringing multiple products to market and to enable new customers to begin development. Nantero has raised over $110m in total and recently closed an over $21m financing round. Nantero develops NRAM chips based on carbon nanotubes that it says offer low power, high endurance, and read/write speeds about 100× faster than NAND flash and comparable to DRAM. The chips are dense, stackable, and miniaturizable below five nanometers, targeting markets such as mobile computing, wearables, consumer electronics, space and military, enterprise systems, automobiles, IoT, and industrial applications. The company has produced tens of thousands of chips to date and created sample 4-megabit memory chips that customers are evaluating. Nantero has installed its NRAM process in seven CMOS fabs and reports agreements with multiple top-three semiconductor companies; more than a dozen major corporate sponsors are actively working on NRAM. Management says it has reduced the cost of carbon nanotubes per chip by tenfold in the last two years and envisions storing terabits on a single chip in the future. The company has more than 50 employees at its Woburn, Massachusetts headquarters, with offices in Silicon Valley and Japan; it was founded in 2001 and spun out its government business to Lockheed Martin in 2008, and holds over 175 U.S. patents issued and about 200 pending. The company raised new funding in this round to advance development and move toward volume production. Nantero develops carbon-nanotube-based semiconductor devices, focusing on NRAM™, a high-density nonvolatile random access memory intended as a universal memory to replace DRAM, SRAM and flash. The company has fabricated devices and is concentrating on the commercial introduction of NRAM. It recently entered into multiple partnerships with major corporations and with Imec to develop its carbon-nanotube-based memory for high-density memories under 20nm. Nantero intends to use newly raised capital to complete development and commercialize its products. The company is led by co-founder and CEO Greg Schmergel. It is based in Woburn, Massachusetts.

Led · Seed · May 2015

Liqid develops the Liqid Matrix composable disaggregated infrastructure (CDI) software platform that enables cloud-like speed and flexibility for data center infrastructure. The platform lets users configure, deploy, and scale physical bare-metal servers in seconds and reallocate accelerators and storage resources via software as needs evolve. Liqid positions its technology as a solution to rigid traditional architectures, improving resource utilization and reducing power and cooling requirements. The company says the capital will be used to identify, create, and pursue evolving market opportunities for CDI solutions amid AI-driven changes across on-prem, cloud, and edge environments. In 2021 Liqid more than doubled its workforce, surpassed 100 customers, and reported 1034% revenue growth from 2017 to 2020. Its customers and partners include the US Department of Defense, Dell Technologies, NVIDIA, Broadcom, and Intel Corporation, and the company is based in Broomfield, Colorado. Liqid’s core product, Liqid Matrix™, is a composable infrastructure software platform that lets users configure, deploy, and scale physical bare‑metal servers in seconds and reallocate accelerators and storage via software. The platform targets AI, HPC, cloud, and edge workloads and emphasizes higher utilization, faster time‑to‑results, and sustainability benefits versus traditional static data center architectures. Liqid says its solutions can deliver 2–3x improvements in utilization and materially reduce energy, water use, and CO2 emissions. In 2021 the company more than doubled its workforce, surpassed 100 customers, and reported 1,034% revenue growth from 2017 to 2020. Customers and partners include the US Department of Defense, Dell Technologies, NVIDIA, Broadcom, and Intel. Liqid intends to use new capital to expand internationally, grow its salesforce and support functions, increase OEM and channel marketing, and accelerate its software development roadmap to maintain market leadership. Liqid offers a software-defined composable infrastructure platform and Command Center orchestration that lets users build dynamic bare-metal servers and reallocate NVMe, GPU, FPGA, Intel Optane, CPU, and networking resources on demand. The platform composes across major fabric types including PCIe Gen3, PCIe Gen4, Ethernet, and InfiniBand. Liqid maintains OEM and technology partnerships with vendors such as Dell Technologies, Inspur, NVIDIA, Phison, Toshiba, Marvell, Intel, Jabil, and KingstonDigital. The company says it recently doubled quarter-over-quarter revenue, achieved record profit, and recorded a record number of customers and deployments. Liqid will use new funding to accelerate growth by increasing budgets for operations, sales, marketing, engineering, and other business-critical functions and to address an expanding number of industry verticals. Liqid builds an on-demand composable infrastructure (CI) platform that pools and composes compute, networking, storage, and graphics processing over a PCIe-based fabric to enable bare-metal server reconfiguration. Its flagship Liqid CI Platform and Liqid Grid fabric switch allow IT administrators to orchestrate and instantly reallocate physical datacenter resources. The company planned general availability of its platform in 2017 and intends to use new funding to accelerate product development, hire engineering talent, and expand sales and marketing. Liqid frames its technology as a solution to the motherboard/chassis limitations that lock resource allocation at purchase. It has OEM partnerships with Kingston Technology and Inspur and cites Phison Electronics as a strategic partner. Liqid is headquartered in Lafayette, Colo. Liqid is operating in stealth to deliver an innovative solution for real-time resource management in data centers, aiming to help organizations keep pace with rapidly changing IT demands. The company positions its product to evolve current data center architectures and improve how resources are allocated and managed. Liqid says its financing will accelerate product development and time to market while enabling it to build out its team. Leadership frames the technology as a potential industry transformer for handling growing volumes of data. The announcement highlights the company’s focus on research and development as the near-term priority. No operating metrics or revenues were disclosed in the articles.