€3 million Series A for French UPMEM From Investors Including Western Digital

UPMEM, a fabless semiconductor start-up, announces Processing In-Memory (PIM), a next generation hardware solution for data intensive applications in the datacenter, solving server-level efficiency and performance bottlenecks.

This acceleration technology is awaited for by big data players as Moore’s law is fading away.

“The new generation of data intensive applications can no longer be easily handled by traditional CPUs,” said Gilles Hamou, CEO and co-founder, UPMEM. “Initial benchmarks by our partners validate the game-changing added-value of UPMEM PIM technology, as well as the strong fit of its programming model for a large scope of real world data-intensive applications.”

The PIM chip, integrating UPMEM’s proprietary RISC processors (DRAM Processing Units, DPUs) and main memory (DRAM), is the building block of an efficient, scalable and programmable acceleration solution for big data applications. Associated with its software development kit, the PIM solution can accelerate data-intensive applications in the datacenter servers 20 times, with close to zero additional energy premium. This leap opens new horizons for big data players, in terms of costs and new services.

UPMEM’s technology solves the Memory Wall and the dominant energy cost of data movement between the processor and its main memory in application servers. Thousands of UPMEM in-memory co-processors (DRAM Processing Units, aka DPUs) orchestrated by the main processor, localize most of data processing in the memory chips, while proposing familiar programmability.

Besides, the UPMEM solution comes without any disruption of existing server hardware, standardized protocols, programming and compiling schemes, removing any barrier for fast adoption. For instance, the solution provides a full DNA mapping and variance analysis in minutes instead of hours, making affordable real-time personalized genomics a reality.

The financing round will enable the company to produce and bring to market its PIM chip-based solution. In parallel, UPMEM will accelerate its evaluation programs with top tier global big data customers and IT labs, using available programming and simulation tools.

UPMEM obtained this series A financing from actors engaged in semiconductors and with a footprint in Europe and the US: C4 Ventures leading the round, Partech Ventures, Supernova Invest, Western Digital Capital, Crédit Agricole bank, and entrepreneurs from the data center and micro electronics industry led by Etix CEO Charles-Antoine Beyney.

Reza Malekzadeh from Partech Ventures and Charles-Antoine Beyney will join the start-up board of directors.

“Data intensive use cases are severally constrained by the Memory Wall issue,” explains Olivier Huez, partner, C4 Ventures. “We’ve looked far and wide and UPMEM’s founders have built the only company on the market which can address this seamlessly and deliver such an impressive uplift in performance.“

“We are no longer in an era were CPUs and other hardware getting continuously faster would mask the slow speed of inefficient software,” said Reza Malekzadeh, general partner, Partech Ventures. “UPMEM’s solution addresses the performance needs of modern scale-out applications while preserving datacenter and infrastructure hardware investments.”

“The PIM concept is not new in itself,” said Christophe Desrumaux, investment director, Supernova Invest. “But UPMEM brings together a world class team, an innovative patented approach without any hardware compatibility disruption, and a full set of design tools that make it widely adoptable by users.”

The UPMEM team, mixing microelectronics and system software experts, is based in Grenoble, the French center for microelectronics and semiconductors.