SCIENCE

Tilera has announced a round of financing, led by Artis Capital Management, that included investment from WestSummit Capital Management and Comerica Bank in addition to existing investors Walden International, Bessemer Venture Partners and Columbia Capital. Cisco Systems and Samsung Venture Investment Co. also participated, joining Tilera's previous strategic investors: Broadcom Corporation, NTT Finance, VentureTech Alliance, and Quanta Computer.

With many customers in production today, the company is operating near break-even and expects to reach profitability later this year. This $45 million round of funding provides a very strong balance sheet to take the company through a robust growth phase.

"Tilera processors deliver unbeatable performance and performance-per-watt to our customers in cloud and communications sectors. Having strategic investors like Cisco and Samsung is a testament to our strong penetration in these markets," said Omid Tahernia, CEO of Tilera. "We welcome the addition of Artis Capital, a well-respected Silicon Valley firm, as well as WestSummit Capital, whose expertise will help us expand our reach into China."

Tilera intends to use this round of funding to accelerate the development of its fourth-generation processor family, to expand sales and marketing, and to build on successes in the cloud computing and communications markets with several new products.

"Samsung Venture sees a huge opportunity for Tilera processors in network security, cloud, wireless and multimedia applications," said Dong-Su Kim, Ph.D., Director at Samsung Venture Investment. "The scalability of the Tile Architecture is a strong differentiator and provides the marketplace with a welcome alternative for high-performance, low-power computing."

"With a top team, revolutionary technology and a solid customer base in the embedded computing and server markets, investing in Tilera was an easy choice for us," said Stuart Peterson, CEO of Artis Capital Management. "We believe the company is extremely well positioned and will continue to capture an increased share of the processor market."

Tilera has been shipping many-core processors since 2007 and serves a number of vertical markets including cloud computing and communications infrastructure. A TILEPro based 512-core server, designed by Quanta computer and first demonstrated in June 2010, is now available. The TILE and TILEPro processor families are currently in production and the highly-anticipated TILE-Gx family, including the world's first 100-core processor, will begin sampling this quarter.