French Crocus Technology Raises 11.5 Million Euros

Crocus Technology, in Magnetic Random Access Memory (MRAM), has raised a combined 11.5 million Euros in its second round of funding. This round hailed full participation from Crocus’ current investors: AGF Private Equity, CDC Innovation, NanoDimension, Sofinnova, and Ventech, raising 8.5M EUR. The company was also awarded an additional 3M EUR in funding from OSEO, a French agency supporting advanced R&D programs, for a total of 11.5M EUR to further the development and bring into production its proprietary MRAM technology as a scalable high density non volatile memory solution with high speed, infinite endurance and low power.

Crocus’ proprietary MRAM technology solves all the well-known problems encountered in earlier MRAM implementations. The company’s technology has demonstrated on silicon its stability, reliability, data retention, endurance, and scalability, while exhibiting high speed, low power dissipation, and excellent resistance to external perturbation. Crocus also recently qualified its complete manufacturing environment for the development and rapid prototyping of MRAM. These achievements have positioned Crocus as one of the very few companies in the world capable of fully integrating advanced MRAM onto CMOS. With this additional funding, Crocus will complete the technology development necessary to support its initial product introduction.

"This round of funding will enable Crocus to move closer to actually delivering on the awesome promise of MRAM. With our first products we will bring a whole new memory paradigm to a number of high volume markets," said Jean Pierre Braun, founder and CEO of Crocus Technology. "While a few companies are busy announcing long term development plans, Crocus is moving quickly toward delivering this groundbreaking MRAM technology solution."

OSEO is a French government agency chartered with funding advanced R&D programs. The agency’s investment budget for 2008 is 500 M EUR, focusing heavily on, but not restricted to, high technology and life science projects.

"Crocus is the kind of company we like to help," said Dr. Francis Martin, member of OSEO for the Rhone Alpes region where Crocus is headquartered. "It is a disruptive technology, developed in one of France’s most prestigious laboratories, addressing a very large market, and ready to move into production."

About Magnetic Random Access Memory
MRAM’s unique characteristics make it particularly suitable to a wide variety of telecommunication, networking, computing and handheld applications currently using SRAM and/or flash memory technology. It is the only scalable new memory technology providing non-volatility, unlimited-write-endurance, high-density, and high-speed. It is particularly well-suited to applications requiring high data reliability and high performance, and has the unique potential of becoming the universal embedded memory technology for systems-on-chip devices.