VCs back New Zealand supercomputing company
A group of VCs including Tokyo-headquartered East Ventures has completed an $8.5 million Series A round for New Zealand big data computing company Nyriad.
Additional participants included Japan’s Idaten Ventures and US firms Data Collective and Prelude Ventures. Local investors New Zealand Venture Investment Fund (NZVIF), Ice Angels and Enterprise Angels also contributed. It brings the company’s total funds raised to date to $11 million.
"This is another example of a New Zealand company developing exceptional technology for a global market and in an area exhibiting vast scale and rapid growth,” Richard Dellabarca, CEO of NZVIF, said in a statement. “Although it is a young company, Nyriad is already involved in major global projects and is gaining traction with large international customers.”
Nyriad specializes in a developing IT discipline known as exascale computing, which aims to allow for the processing of large data sets at a rate of a billion billion – or one quintillion – calculations per second. It claims to be able to significantly reduce hardware, operating and energy consumption costs in both computing and data storage by using specialized circuitry structures known as graphics processing units (GPU).
The company’s first product, Nsulate (pictured), is a GPU-accelerated storage system that is said to enable automatic data recovery on scales impossible with conventional computing architecture. It was originally designed to increase supercomputing capacity at the Square Kilometer Array radio telescope project, which is planned to span New Zealand, Australia and South Africa.
The fresh capital is planned to support ongoing expansion of the business within New Zealand, including further investment in engineering resources and the launch of Nsulate in the first quarter of 2018. Nyriad is expected to continue operating in New Zealand throughout its expansion and support the local technology ecosystem through the cultivation of a new engineering talent base.
Global competition to establish the first viable exascale computing system has amplified in recent years, with programs by the Chinese and US governments reportedly set to launch similar high-performance machines within the year. Last month, the European Union initiated a EUR1 billion ($1.2 billion) project to build an exascale computer by 2022-23.
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