We first encountered Samplify Systems back in 2009 when the company made the EETimes Silicon 60 9.0 list. However, this fabless semiconductor startup has been around much longer that that, namely since 2006 when the company received $300K in initial funding. The following year the company raised an additional $6.5M in Series A funding, to be followed by $4M in unattributed funding in 2010. Yesterday, the company announced it received $11.2M in Series B funding from Integrated Device Technology, Charles River Ventures, Formative Ventures, and Schlumberger, bringing the total capital raised to a respectable $22M over the last few years.
Samplify Systems, continuously entering new markets
EETimes Silicon 60 List, version 10.0 summary
It has been a while since we took a look at the emerging startup lists over at EETimes.com. To be frank, it has not been entirely our fault. When the 10th revision was published, EETimes.com for the first time decided to make only available for a fee. We figured eventually they would make it freely available and decided to pass. Well, it seems that rather than making it free, the 10th edition just simply vanished along with the on-demand web-site which hosted it. Luckily for us we managed to find a pdf version of the 10th edition hosted over here. EETimes.com has since also released the 11th edition of this list, free of charge this time, which we will examine shortly. Without any further ado, here is a quick list of the newly added companies in the 10th edition:
Zenverge, multi-format encoding, decoding, and transcoding
A lot has been happening as of late on the high definition (HD) video streaming front. Back in November we wrote about Celeno a startup specializing in wireless HD video streaming, A month earlier we wrote about Quantenna which is another semiconductor startup specializing in Wi-Fi chips which should allow for multiple concurrent 1080p streams. And of course last year we also attended the the GSA Luncheon where DirectTV discussed their plans for content distribution within the house. With all the talk about distribution, it seems that relatively little attention has been paid to the fact that many of the devices which consume this content tend to come in different form factors. As a consequence these devices tend to support different resolutions, different standards, as well as different types of encryption, which is precisely where Zenverge comes in.
Veridae Systems, semiconductor startup on a budget
Most of the time when writing about semiconductor startups one encounters funding numbers in the $10-20 million per funding round. As a matter of fact, back in September we wrote about the high startup costs for a semiconductor startups and an article by Jim Truley titled “How to Blow $100 Million” which discussed the costs in more details. As such, it comes as a nice surprise to come across an EDA startup which has managed to stretch $150k in initial seed funding for more than two years. How have they done it? Curt Cherewayko over at BIV Business Today in an article titled “New Semiconductor Startup Debugs the High-Tech Commercialization Model” does a pretty good job of discussing how Veridae Systems has been able to make it happen with such limited funding. In summary, this EDA startup has modeled itself more or less on lean internet startups by utilizing a lot of open source software, slowly ramping full-time positions only when absolutely necessary, and offering advisors options rather than wages.
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@icdboss noted, hopefully they will have a better experience dealing with Samsung locally, given the company's large presence in Austin