Munich, Germany – December 4th, 2018 – Codasip GmbH, the leading supplier of RISC-V® embedded processor IP, announced today that it has raised $10M in a Series A investment round led by private equity firms Ventech Capital of Paris, France, Shenzhen Capital Group Co., Ltd. of Shenzhen, China, Paua Ventures of Berlin, Germany, and strategic investor Western Digital, following the initial investment led by Credo Ventures of Prague, Czech Republic.
This investment will allow Codasip to grow its global sales and support team while expanding its product development efforts to bring best-in-class RISC-V processor intellectual property and optimization tools to customers around the world.
“The RISC-V movement is growing at a rapid pace and transitioning from an era of raising awareness to an era of customer adoption,” stated Christian Claussen, General Partner of Ventech Capital and a board member of Codasip. “Codasip have the tools and expertise developed over the last decade to create a broad portfolio of licensable RISC-V processors and bring them to market. Ventech Capital is confident that Codasip will continue to provide innovative products to the semiconductor industry.”
Martin Fink, Chief Technology Officer at Western Digital, added: “Western Digital is focused on the next generation of innovation to enable new classes of applications like machine learning, AI, and analytics to deliver the possibilities of data. RISC-V offers a platform for innovation unshackled from the proprietary interface of the past, and this freedom allows us to optimize special-purpose computing capabilities targeted at big data and fast data applications.”
Karel Masařík, Codasip’s founder and CEO, said: “We are honored to welcome aboard this global syndicate of investors who share Codasip’s vision of bringing innovative RISC-V-based processors and optimization tools to the world, and we appreciate the continued dedication, commitment, and support of our earlier investors and the current team.”
Codasip aims to have the most comprehensive portfolio of RISC-V processor technology in the industry. Codasip Studio allows for rapid processor development and helps customers differentiate their products through processor IP that is tailored to their design and software requirements, and does so with less cost and risk than using general-purpose offerings. Studio dramatically simplifies the process of optimizing a processor, delivers enormous performance improvement to customers, and allows them to build their own unique RISC-V core that is just right for their application.
About Codasip
Codasip delivers leading-edge processor IP and high-level design tools that provide ASIC designers with all the advantages of the RISC-V open-standard ISA, along with the unique ability to automatically optimize the processor IP. As a founding member of the RISC-V Foundation and a long-term supplier of LLVM and GNU-based processor solutions, Codasip is committed to open standards for embedded processors.
Formed in 2006 with research and development located in Brno, Czech Republic, Codasip currently has offices in the US and Europe, with representatives in Asia and Israel. Codasip is currently venture-backed by Credo Ventures, Ventech Capital, Shenzhen Capital Group Co., Ltd. of Shenzhen, China, Paua Ventures, and Western Digital.
For more information about Codasip’s products and services, visit codasip.com.
About RISC-V
RISC-V (pronounced “risk-five”) is an open, free ISA enabling a new era of processor innovation through open standard collaboration. Born in academia and research, RISC-V ISA delivers a new level of free, extensible software and hardware freedom on architecture, paving the way for the next 50 years of computing design and innovation. For more information, visit www.riscv.org.
