Sales of Cards and Development Stations, and Related Licenses and Services, Generated Sales of €415,000 for Kalray in 1H21

Kalray Corp. publishes a status on 1H21⁽¹⁾ activity (from January 1 to June 30, 2021) and on this occasion, looks back on the highlights of the period.

Éric Baissus, president,executive board, commented: “The 1H21 has seen Kalray continue its roadmap in its target markets through the deployment of its accelerator cards in both the data center and automotive markets. This semester, 2 products have already been announced with Kalray processors: the Bluebox 3.0 platform for the automotive market by NXP and the FURIO1200 storage appliance by Wistron. At the same time, we continue our efforts to meet the needs of our customers and deploy our products in the market. We are pleased to announce that in addition to our acceleration cards, we are developing an integrated offering for the storage market, the Kalray FLASHBOX.

With the FLASHBOX, Kalray will be able to offer its customers and partners, enterprises and cloud service providers a complete NVMe storage appliance based on the NVMe standard and its acceleration cards, starting in September. This integrated offering, co-developed with a major server player and complementary to Kalray’s acceleration cards, is aimed at the fast-growing NVMe storage market for AI and high-speed data processing applications. This is the result of several factors: a need from end customers, particularly in Europe, for a turnkey solution that is easy to integrate; a need from our partners, server manufacturers and resellers, to be able to offer a complete solution that is easy to deploy on the market; and finally, an opportunity for the firm to deploy its storage offering more quickly, and to enhance with its customers and strategic partners the functions that only its technology is capable of offering. The FLASHBOX will be distributed by our partners, OEMs and integrators.

This half-year has also enabled the company to make progress on 2 applications targeted by acceleration cards, which have promising potential and which it is developing with renowned partners: a first application aimed at accelerating virtualized environments in the cloud, in collaboration with our partners Vates SAS and Scaleway (group Iliad) with first products expected by the end of the year, and the development of more economical and sovereign servers for 5G, in particular with Orange and Bull/Atos.

“This allows us to be confident about our revenue targets for this year, particularly with the sale of the K200-LP cards and the first FLASHBOX, and about our longer-term goals in the context of an accelerator card and edge computing market, which is confirmed as one of the key markets in our industry for the next decade.“

Kalray continues to deploy its acceleration cards for the data center market with its k200-lp card: 

For storage …

The firm has announced in 1H21 the K200-LP, a new accelerator card.

This card has been designed with a small form factor (low profile), low power consumption (30W) and for high-volume production. It targets the storage market but also the data center and cloud market in general. Indeed, in addition to being at the heart of firm’s storage offering and of the upcoming FLASHBOX solution, the K200-LP aims to reduce appliance power consumption in next-gen data centers and edge data centers.

The first sales volumes are confirmed for 2H21 in the storage market.

… To optimize virtualized environments with Vates and Scaleway … 
In addition to storage applications, Kalray announced the development, with its partner Vates and in collaboration with Scaleway, of a new secure, performance-optimized virtualization stack targeting data-intensive applications. This offering will combine new K200-LP accelerator card, featuring the latest gen MPPA Coolidge processor, with Vates optimized XCP-ng open-source virtualization solution. The goal is to offload an amount of data to firm’s processors, leveraging the performance and low power of company’s processors to provide a more efficient overall solution to end customers. This offering will be available at the end of 2021.

… And to be at the heart of 5G and edge computing with Orange and Atos
Kalray is also accelerating the deployment of its offering in the broader 5G and edge computing markets. It announced the development of a power-optimized 5G offering with Orange and Atos, using its accelerator cards. This development is part of the PIRANA (Platform Inline for Radio, Application and Network Accelerations) project, which was awarded the Sovereign Solutions for Telecommunication Networks project of the French government Invest for the Future plan. The objective of this project is to build a sovereign French and European offer in 5G, while main market players are currently American or Chinese.

Kalray prepares to launch next gen storage appliance: FLASHBOX
The AI and data-intensive processing market is booming, especially in the fields of data analytics, finance, genomics. To meet these needs, Kalray has been developing for several months with a partner and major player a next-gen NVMe storage array leveraging Kalray’s acceleration cards: the FLASHBOX. The FLASHBOX aims to facilitate the adoption of NVMe technology by offering end customers, enterprises or cloud service providers, a storage array, with all the necessary software layer, ready to be integrated easily into customers’ infrastructures. It is based on a partner redundant chassis and one or more Kalray intelligent storage accelerator cards. With its performance and ease of integration, the company believes this NVMe storage appliance will enable the storage of large data streams, while offering the same ease of use and adoption as solutions using traditional technologies. This offering will complement Kalray’s partner Wistron’s FURIO1200 storage appliances.

Kalray plans to unveil the features of this new product at a partner and customer event in late September. The FLASHBOX will be available for resale through OEMs and original design manufacturers partners and can also be used as a reference design for server manufacturers to develop their own NVMe storage appliance using Kalray’s cards.

Stable net sales and strong cash position
In 1H21, sales of cards and development stations, as well as related licenses and services, generated sales of €415,000 almost stable compared to the first half of 2020 (€489,000 as of 30 June 2020). This is revenue from the pre-volume phase, with increased revenue expected for 2H21 with the sale of accelerator cards and the first sales of the next-gen storage appliance, the FLASHBOX.

Cash at June 30, 2021 amounted to €18.8 million, a limited decrease of €1.4 million compared to December 31, 2020, thanks to good control of cash consumption while investments are continuing and to the activation of the equity financing line ⁽²⁾ set up with Kepler Cheuvreux SA for an amount of €7.0 million as of June 30, 2021 (out of a total of €12 million, issue premium included, over a maximum period 24 months).

Ambitions confirmed for 2021 and 2023
Finally, Kalray confirms its ambition to generate revenues in the order of several million euros in 2021. This ambition will be refined on the occasion of the publication of the half-yearly results. The gradual ramp-up of volumes will support net sales in the coming years and the company confirms its ambition to reach €100 million in annual net sales in 2023.

⁽¹⁾ Net sales and cash as of June 30, 2021 are audited information.
⁽²⁾ cf press release dated January 21,2021