Participated · Equity · Dec 2023

FeelTect’s core product, Tight Alright, integrates disposable pressure sensors with a reusable transmitter and cloud platform to give clinicians real-time data on sub-bandage pressure during compression therapy. By keeping pressure within therapeutic ranges, the technology aims to shorten healing times and cut overall treatment costs for chronic wounds. After multi-year clinical validation, the company is moving from pilot studies to its first commercial deployment at Thun Hospital in Switzerland. The recent funding will finance a broader commercial roll-out, regulatory expansion into additional markets, and team growth at its Spiddal, Galway base. FeelTect previously secured a similar capital injection in 2023 to fund product finalisation and early market preparation. Investors across the two rounds include Irrus Investments, the Western Development Commission, Halo Business Angel Network, and other individual angels. The company has not yet disclosed revenue or user numbers but positions itself to become a global leader in compression-therapy monitoring.

Participated · Series B · Sep 2021

Deep Vision is a Los Altos, CA-based developer of a patented AI processor and a software development suite for edge computing applications. Its ARA-1 processor targets camera-based use cases such as smart retail, driver-monitoring systems, smart city deployments, drones, and factory automation. The processor also provides natural language processing capabilities for voice-controlled applications. Deep Vision complements the chip with development tools that convert customers' neural network models into optimized computation graphs ready for deployment on ARA-1. The company intends to use the funds to expand the capabilities of its AI processor and software tools and to support its customer base. Ravi Annavajjhala is the company's Chief Executive Officer.

Participated · Equity · Feb 2021

Pliops develops hardware-accelerated "data processors" designed to boost performance of databases and other applications that run on flash memory. Its processor delivers drive fail protection, in-line compression that maps variable-sized compressed objects to reduce wasted space, and a hardware-accelerated key-value storage engine. The company says its hardware frees CPUs from computationally intensive storage tasks, improving performance, reliability and scalability for data-intensive workloads. Pliops’ processor became commercially available last July and the team is focusing on accelerating data ingest for machine learning use cases. The startup reports deployments and pilots with unnamed customers including fintechs, medium-sized communication service providers, data center operators and government labs. Financially, Pliops closed a $100M Series D and has raised more than $200M in total capital to date, funds it plans to use to advance its hardware and software roadmap, broaden partner footprints and expand international headcount. Pliops builds a hardware-enabled storage engine (a storage processor) delivered as a PCIe card or cloud service that aims to unlock the full potential of SSD storage by improving cost, performance and endurance. Its platform combines patented data structures and algorithms to reduce data amplification and deliver up to 100x faster data access with lower computational load and power consumption. Pliops' storage processors are shipping to select customers and the company says it is engaged with major cloud providers, storage innovators and enterprise users as customers and partners. The company plans to scale its technology into new use cases, expand its product line, deliver broad availability of the storage processor, and offer the solution in multiple forms (on premises, cloud, integrated with customer products, or as an ASIC). Pliops also intends to double the size of the company by the end of 2021 and has expanded its executive team and resources to support that growth. The most recent financing positions the company to bring its storage processor to more customers and use cases. Pliops develops a storage processor product intended to enable cloud databases and enterprise data centers to access data faster while reducing compute load, network traffic and power consumption. Its processor targets scalability challenges for cloud storage and the growing data needs of AI and ML, and integrates via standard APIs with major cloud databases such as MySQL and Cassandra. The offering is positioned for use across big data, software-defined storage, hyperconverged infrastructure, HPC, telco, edge and all-flash array architectures. The company was founded in 2017 by flash storage industry veterans from Samsung, M-Systems and XtremIO and holds eight core patents pending. Pliops plans to accelerate development of its storage processor technology and expand teams in the US, Israel and China, with a product debut planned for mid-2019. Leadership includes CEO Uri Beitler and President/chief business officer Steve Fingerhut, who will lead global expansion.

Participated · Series C · Feb 2020

NGD Systems manufactures NVMe Computational Storage Drives (CSDs) that perform AI, ML and advanced analytics inside the storage device using patented In‑Situ processing. Its CSDs combine localized compute and storage in industry-standard NVMe SSD form factors with capacities up to 32TB and are optimized for power efficiency. The drives are designed to eliminate data movement bottlenecks by processing data where it resides, significantly decreasing latency and network bandwidth requirements. NGD targets edge computing, data-intensive AI/ML applications, CDNs, hyperscale and other environments that require localized analytics and high-capacity, low-power storage. The company says it will use the $20M Series C to accelerate production, deployment and go-to-market activities including sales and marketing to meet growing edge and mass-data workloads. NGD has raised $45 million to date and cites customer validation such as Booking.com noting 12W power for a 32TB device with consistently low latency. NGD Systems develops computational storage devices that embed compute capability into SSDs via its proprietary controller technology, including a patented Elastic FTL algorithm and Advanced LDPC Engines. The company focuses on bringing computation to data to accelerate storage-centric processing. Proceeds from the recent financing will be used to accelerate commercialization, continue technology innovation, and migrate its 14nm SSD controller to mass production. NGD was founded in 2013 and is led by President and CEO Nader Salessi. It is based in Irvine, CA. To date the company has raised $26M in total capital.

Participated · Equity · Oct 2019

Blade is a cloud computing specialist and Next40 member best known for Shadow, its online gaming service. Shadow is described as a high-quality online gaming service with around 70,000 subscribers worldwide. On October 28, 2019, Blade completed a €33.5m capital increase to finance rapid development, attracting historic shareholders and new investors. As part of the operation, 2CRSi took a €2m equity stake through conversion of debt, reinforcing a special partnership between the companies. New CEO Jérôme Arnaud said the raise provides solid visibility to accelerate development and launch new offerings in France and abroad under the new management. The company also highlights commercial ties with OVHCloud and intends to leverage its technological infrastructure performance as a decisive asset for its growth. Blade operates Shadow, a cloud PC service that lets users run high-end Windows 10 games on ordinary devices like older PCs, smart TVs, laptops, Macs, tablets, and smartphones. The service targets low-latency, high‑quality experiences (up to 4K) and requires roughly 15 Mbps for a stable connection. Blade says it can capture and compress 4K images in under three milliseconds by capturing frames inside the graphics chip. The company launched Shadow in France in November 2017 and completed a soft launch in California to validate platform and data-center infrastructure. Blade plans to roll out new services, hire talent in the U.S. and Europe, and expand through partnerships with game studios (Ubisoft Nadeo) and esports organizations (Team Envy). The company has indicated a $35/month pricing target as an alternative to buying an expensive gaming PC.