 | |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Data Center Technology |
| Founded | 2015 |
| Founders | |
| Headquarters | , United States |
Key people |
|
Number of employees | 200 [5] |
| Parent | Microsoft (2023–present) |
| Website | fungible |
Fungible Inc. is a technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. The company develops hardware and software to improve the performance, reliability and economics of data centers. [6]
The company was founded in 2015 by Pradeep Sindhu, co-founder and chief scientist of Juniper Networks, and Bertrand Serlet, former senior vice president of software engineering at Apple Inc. [7] [8]
In February 2017, the company raised $32 million in a series A round, led by Mayfield Fund, Walden Riverwood Ventures and Battery Ventures. [9]
In June 2019, the company raised $200 million (~$227 million in 2022) in a series C funding round, led by SoftBank Vision Fund, along with Norwest Venture Partners and existing investors. [10] By then, the company had 200 employees. [5]
In September 2019, Fungible announced the appointment of former Dell and IBM chief technical officer Dr. Jai Menon as its chief scientist. [11]
In July 2021, Fungible announced the appointment of Eric Hayes replacing Pradeep Sindhu as its CEO. [12]
In January 2023, Microsoft announced the acquisition of Fungible to bolster its data center infrastructure and their data processing unit. [13]
Fungible develops a new category of programmable microprocessors called Data Processing Units (DPU), designed to accelerate the processing of data-centric workloads within data centers. [14] [15] The DPU acts as a data traffic controller, shuttling traffic from the network to central processing units (CPU) and graphics processing units (GPU) from other chip makers. DPUs enable a high speed data center fabric between DPU-enabled compute and storage servers. [10] [15]
The microprocessors enable the next evolution of data center infrastructure known as composable disaggregated infrastructure, which is a way for data centers to improve their architecture by disassociating compute and storage elements, removing the physical limitations of existing servers. [16] Data center resources can be pooled and aggregated dynamically over a high speed data fabric. [17]
Bertrand Serlet is a French software engineer and businessman; he worked first at the Institut national de recherche en informatique et en automatique (INRIA) before leaving France for the United States in 1985. He was the Senior Vice President of Software Engineering at Apple Inc.
A multi-core processor is a microprocessor on a single integrated circuit with two or more separate processing units, called cores, each of which reads and executes program instructions. The instructions are ordinary CPU instructions but the single processor can run instructions on separate cores at the same time, increasing overall speed for programs that support multithreading or other parallel computing techniques. Manufacturers typically integrate the cores onto a single integrated circuit die or onto multiple dies in a single chip package. The microprocessors currently used in almost all personal computers are multi-core.
Pradeep Sindhu is an Indian-American business executive. He is the chairman, chief development officer (CDO) and co-founder of data center technology company Fungible. Previously, he co-founded Juniper Networks, where he was the chief scientist and served as CEO until 1996.
Mayfield, also known as Mayfield Fund, is a US-based venture capital firm that focuses on early-stage to growth-stage investments in enterprise and consumer technology companies. Founded in 1969 and based in Menlo Park, California, it is one of Silicon Valley's oldest venture capital firms.
Marvell Technology, Inc. is an American company, headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware, which develops and produces semiconductors and related technology. Founded in 1995, the company had more than 7,000 employees as of 2023, with over 10,000 patents worldwide, and an annual revenue of $5.9 billion for fiscal 2023.
Tilera Corporation was a fabless semiconductor company focusing on manycore embedded processor design. The company shipped multiple processors in the TILE64, TILEPro64, and TILE-Gx lines.
Stream Processors, Inc. (SPI), was a Silicon Valley-based fabless semiconductor company specializing in the design and manufacture of high-performance digital signal processors for applications including video surveillance, multi-function printers and video conferencing. The company ceased operations in 2009.
Redpoint Ventures is an American venture capital firm focused on investments in seed, early and growth-stage companies.
Afara Websystems Inc. was a Sunnyvale, California, USA server company whose goal was to build servers surrounding a custom high-throughput CPU architecture, "developing IP traffic management systems that will bring quality-of-service to the next generation of IP access infrastructure." The word "Afara" means "bridge" in the West African Yoruba language.
A data processing unit (DPU) is a programmable computer processor that tightly integrates a general-purpose CPU with network interface hardware. Sometimes they are called "IPUs" or "SmartNICs". They can be used in place of traditional NICs to relieve the main CPU of complex networking responsibilities and other "infrastructural" duties; although their features vary, they may be used to perform encryption/decryption, serve as a firewall, handle TCP/IP, process HTTP requests, or even function as a hypervisor or storage controller. These devices can be attractive to cloud computing providers whose servers might otherwise spend a significant amount of CPU time on these tasks, cutting into the cycles they can provide to guests.
PrivateCore is a venture-backed startup located in Palo Alto, California that develops software to secure server data through server attestation and memory encryption. The company's attestation and memory encryption technology fills a gap that exists between “data in motion” encryption and “data at rest” encryption by protecting “data in use”. PrivateCore memory encryption technology protects against threats to servers such as cold boot attacks, hardware advanced persistent threats, rootkits/bootkits, computer hardware supply chain attacks, and physical threats to servers from insiders. PrivateCore was acquired by Facebook on 7 August 2014.
DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational technology company and cloud service provider. The company is headquartered in New York City, New York, US, with 15 globally distributed data centers. DigitalOcean provides developers, startups, and SMBs with cloud infrastructure-as-a-service platforms.
Computation offloading is the transfer of resource intensive computational tasks to a separate processor, such as a hardware accelerator, or an external platform, such as a cluster, grid, or a cloud. Offloading to a coprocessor can be used to accelerate applications including: image rendering and mathematical calculations. Offloading computing to an external platform over a network can provide computing power and overcome hardware limitations of a device, such as limited computational power, storage, and energy.
Kalray is a French fabless semiconductor company headquartered in Montbonnot, France.
Graphcore Limited is a British semiconductor company that develops accelerators for AI and machine learning. It has introduced a massively parallel Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU) that holds the complete machine learning model inside the processor.
Wasabi Technologies, Inc. is an American object storage service provider based in Boston, Massachusetts that sells one product, an object storage service called Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage. The company was co-founded in September 2015 by David Friend and Jeff Flowers and launched its cloud storage product in May 2017.
Ampere Computing LLC is an American fabless semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California that develops processors for servers operating in large scale environments. Ampere also has offices in: Portland, Oregon; Taipei, Taiwan; Raleigh, North Carolina; Bangalore, India; Warsaw, Poland; and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Data-centric computing is an emerging concept that has relevance in information architecture and data center design. It describes an information system where data is stored independently of the applications, which can be upgraded without costly and complicated data migration. This is a radical shift in information systems that will be needed to address organizational needs for storing, retrieving, moving and processing exponentially growing data sets.
The Samsung Catalyst Fund (SCF) is the evergreen venture capital fund of Samsung Electronics. The fund invests in deep technology, artificial intelligence and big data startups. The fund's headquarters are located in San Jose, California, with offices in Seoul, Tel Aviv, and Paris.
Nvidia BlueField is a line of data processing units (DPUs) designed and produced by Nvidia. Initially developed by Mellanox Technologies, the BlueField IP was acquired by Nvidia in March 2019, when Nvidia acquired Mellanox Technologies for US$6.9 billion. The first Nvidia produced BlueField cards, named BlueField-2, were shipped for review shortly after their announcement at VMworld 2019, and were officially launched at GTC 2020. Also launched at GTC 2020 was the Nvidia BlueField-2X, an Nvidia BlueField card with an Ampere generation Graphic Processing Unit integrated onto the same card. BlueField-3 and BlueField-4 DPUs were first announced at GTC 2021, with the tentative launch dates for these cards being 2022 and 2024 respectively.
