Rapid Silicon, a start-up based in San Jose, California, announced $30 million in series A funding for its AI and intelligent edge-focused FPGAs based on open-source technology.
The company has closed $15M in funding from Cambium Capital and others, including all existing investors from its seed round. The second close is planned for Q1 2023. This latest round of funding will be used to further invest in Rapid Silicon’s product portfolio, support the launch of its premier low-end FPGA product, Gemini, and to build on the company’s momentum in leading the adoption of open-source software for commercial applications.
Rapid Silicon says its Gemini programmable logic device (PLD) is power optimized for the massive sensor processing needs, tight thermal profiles, and shrinking form factors required by embedded and edge applications. Rapid Silicon’s software, Raptor Design Suite, is a commercial FPGA EDA suite based on end-to-end open-source software. The Raptor Design Suite outperformed all leading EDA tools in the recent École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) Combinational Benchmark Suite competition.
“Customers are looking for innovative ways to program FPGAs, reduce support load by leveraging the open-source ecosystem of active expertise and development engineers, and shorten time-to-market,” said Dr. Naveed Sherwani, Chairman and CEO of Rapid Silicon. “With open-source software, Rapid Silicon is removing the barriers and providing its customers with a robust end-to-end FPGA design workflow. The open-source software enables users to design complex applications quickly and efficiently on our FPGA devices.”
