RapidMind Inc. has been awarded the coveted Start Up Company with the Best Innovation award as part of the 2007 Premier’s Catalyst Awards that help build a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship in Ontario by recognizing excellence and leadership in innovation. RapidMind is enabling life-saving technologies such as real-time cancer detection, HD broadcast video encoding, and life-like visualization tools for the aerospace and automotive industries. The Start-up Company with the Best Innovation Award celebrates emerging companies that have outstanding performance, growing revenues and the potential to become a market leader. “This award quite rightly recognizes RapidMind as an innovator among innovators,” said David Johnston, president of the University of Waterloo. “The company stands as a wonderful example of what can happen when an idea that begins in a university like ours is nurtured and developed in an entrepreneurial city or region like Waterloo. The successes speak for themselves.” “We are truly honored to receive this award,” said Dr. Ray DePaul, president and CEO of RapidMind. “Building a world class technology business is a lofty goal, but when you look at the environment that we live in, I like our chances.” Based in Waterloo, Canada, RapidMind is a venture-backed private company that is built on over five years of advanced research and development from the University of Waterloo. Originally Founded by Dr. Michael McCool and Stefanus Du Toit, and backed by partnerships with industry leaders like AMD, Hewlett-Packard and IBM, RapidMind is now the industry standard for multi-core programming. Developers of HPC and enterprise software are using RapidMind today to create manageable, single-threaded applications that leverage the full potential of multi-core processors from AMD and Intel and to seamlessly take advantage of the application acceleration available from GPUs and the Cell Broadband Engine.