UltraSoC secures targeted venture capital for analytic IP

Analytic IP vendor UltraSoC Ltd. (Cambridge, England) has raised £5 million in equity funding from European venture capital firms to target expansion and security applications.
Investors eCapital, with an interest in cybersecurity, and Seraphim Capital, a specialist investor in the space ecosystem, joined existing UltraSoC investors Indaco Venture Partners, Octopus Ventures, Oxford Capital, Techgate, and business angel Guillaume d’Eyssautier, in the latest funding round.

Willi Mannheims, managing partner at eCAPITAL, and James Bruegger, managing partner at Seraphim Capital join the UltraSoC board as investor director and observer respectively.

Rupert Baines, CEO of UltraSoC, told eeNews Europe that the latest funding “is a bridge and we will be doing another round fairly soon. This gives us a way to deliver on some targeted projects.” Baines said the round had received more interest. “We considered making the round bigger but we decided to cap it.”

UltraSoC was founded in 2005 and currently has 35 employees. The funds would be used to increase staffing to about 50 by the end of 2019 and to employ more people in 2020

As part of its planned expansion, UltraSoC will be recruiting hardware and software engineers at its headquarters in Cambridge, UK, and design center in Bristol UK. It also plans to open an engineering center in Warsaw, Poland to develop its data science and machine-learning technologies.

UltraSoC chairman, Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, commented: “Developers are struggling to cope with the need for trusted solutions for cybersecurity and functional safety. UltraSoC is uniquely able to provide such features at the fundamental hardware level. eCAPITAL and Seraphim add sector-specific focus and expertise in cybersecurity and in the aerospace ecosystem, where functional safety and reliability are paramount.”

Willi Mannheims commented: “UltraSoC has developed a novel approach to cybersecurity that places anomaly detection directly into the silicon, enabling hardware-based threat detection.” He added: “This can identify attacks very quickly – in microseconds rather than milliseconds. It is also more robust than traditional techniques, because it is below the OS and is therefore very hard for an attacker to detect, circumvent or subvert.”

In the last year UltraSoC has licensed its technology to Seagate and is supporting Western Digital’s SweRV processor architecture. Other customers include Alibaba company C-Sky Microsystems, Esperanto, Kraftway and Microchip.

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